Online Video SEO ~ Best Practices for YouTube

1. Complete Your YouTube Profile.  Include your company's URL in the YouTube profile section. Also add all of your social media links for your corporate blog, twitter handle, Facebook page, etc. in the "About Me" section.
2. Video Title. Include target SEO keywords in the title of your video. Be as descriptive as possible with the text in the title. Title the video, "Virtual Tour of New Home in Houston, Texas" not "virtual tour #2".
3. Description.  Only the first 27 characters show up. Think carefully about those first 27 words and what you want to display. As you get past the 27 character mark, use very descriptive language of the video (using your keywords). The description area is another place to include links to your corporate website, blog, Twitter account.
4. Category.  Choose a category that best fits your corporate video. The number and type of categories options is limited by YouTube. If you have trouble choosing a category that's a fit consider selecting categories that your competitors or partners are using for their videos on YouTube.
5. Video Thumbnail.  Most YouTube users are limited to choosing one of three video thumbnail images. Choose the best-looking thumbnail available and preferably one that includes your corporate logo.
6. Tags.  Tags are very important for YouTube in classifying your video which is what gets your video found in search results. Use at least 10 descriptive tags per video. Multi-word tags should be entered as one word tags (i.e. new home = newhome).  Be sure to mirror the tags with the word order in the video title. Tags are also the driver for the related video suggestions on YouTube.
7. Tagging Locations.  Once your corporate video is uploaded to YouTube tag its location. Remember YouTube is owned by Google and closely aligned, once you tag your location, your company's videos can then be included in Google Maps and Google Paces or on Google Earth searches.
8. Captions & Subtitles. Upload closed caption text and subtitles to your corporate videos on YouTube since the text is crawled. The auto transcription provided by YouTube is fairly inaccurate (but can prove quite humorous on a boring day). Create your own transcript in a TXT file and upload. The text of the captions doesn't have to match the video word for word. When creating the transcript, remove pronouns and replace with your company or product name for SEO effect.
9. Subscribers / Community.  YouTube is like a high school, the more popular you are, the easier it is to get attention. Ask for community comments and "thumbs ups" approval when posting to internal groups or on your corporate website, this will help your video's search rankings on YouTube.