Liu was joined by The Search Agency's Drew Hubbard, RAMP Digital CEO Jonathan Mendez, and JC Longbottom from Performics at SMX West for the "Up Close With YouTube" session. The information in this article is a product of that session.

How Can You Improve Your Video Ranking?

The fact that YouTube is an important search engine means marketers have to strive to get their videos ranked. Some simple things that can improve your rankings include:

- An accurate and descriptive title

- Make sure your description is just that - descriptive. It should be accurate and unique, and use complete sentences.

- Descriptive keyword tags - avoid keyword stuffing

Community Opinion

Obviously YouTube is more than merely a video search engine. You
might consider it a social network. It is a community. That means
community opinion counts. As with any other community on the web,
your best results will come if you actively participate. This means
sharing videos with other members. Experiment with annotations,
video responses, and thumbnails.

Other YouTube Tools At Your Disposal

Liu touched on a few other aspects of YouTube that marketers should pay attention to. One of course would be embeds or embedded videos.He says you have to make them more discoverable. The beauty of this is that it should be extremely easy to do as they can be embeddedjust about anywhere.


He also mentioned YouTube Insight, which is a video analytics tool they launched last year. With this, marketers can view demographics, find out where videos are posted, who posted them etc. A few months ago, they released a pretty cool feature for it called " Hot Spots," which lets you pinpoint the specific parts of the video that get viewed the most.


What to Do and What Not to Do

JC Longhorn spoke next, and he looked at a couple of examples of what to do and what not to do. First, looked at a few super bowl ads, but focused on Pepsi's MacGruber ad, otherwise known as the "Pepsuber" campaign. This started online as a YouTube sponsored video.

As a result of the Pepsuber ad, people searched for that word and rankings were high on YouTube and Google for it. They had a branded channel page for the campaign and made it engaging, which really pushed the ad's success.

He then talked about a Denny's ad for a free breakfast, which had potential, but didn't do everything right. The Denny's website was not prepared for the incoming traffic and crashed as a result. They should've created an engaging branded channel page.