How to Use YouTube for SEO

You can improve your SEO by uploading videos to YouTube and including a link to your website. gives a few tips below how to best take advantage of this opportunity:

Titles and Tagging

YouTube can’t view and understand videos (yet), so it relies heavily on video titles and tags to index the content. Titles work similarly to Meta titles on regular web pages. You want to write them for the viewers not the search engine while sprinkling in the important keywords that you want your video to rank for.

Tags are a bit tricker, they are similar to the old Meta keywords on regular pages.The goal is to make relevant tags, quality over quantity, as you want your viewing time to be high and irrelevant tags bring irrelevant views. YouTube has this to say about viewing time:

High Quality Descriptions

Descriptions are often overlooked by SEOs since links within the description are NoFollow and pass no value. This however is a terrible mistake; video descriptions are a great place to further explain your video, provide social media links about yourself to the viewer, mention other videos that might be of value to the viewers, etc. Fill in your description and never underestimate the power of text on a YouTube video.

by Joe Seidler