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238 Part IV Promotion and Monetization

How YouTube Searches for Videos

Online search is all about keywords. A keyword is a word or phrase entered as part
of a search query; it’s what people are searching for.

For example, if someone is looking for videos about sailboats, he might enter the
keyword sailboat. If someone is looking for videos about meatloaf recipes, she
might enter meatloaf recipe. If someone is interested in learning how to shoot a
jump shot, he might enter how to shoot jump shot. You get the drift.

YouTube, then, tries to match the keywords entered by a user with those videos that
best fit that query. In our first example, YouTube would display videos about sail-
boats; in the second, videos showing how to cook meatloaf; and in the third, videos
that demonstrate how to shoot jump shots.

Just how does YouTube match queries to videos? Unfortunately, YouTube has no
way of analyzing a video itself to determine its content; that technology does not
yet exist. Instead, YouTube must rely on the description of the video to determine
its content. That’s right, YouTube analyzes the text you enter to figure out what your
video is about—and match it to the appropriate search queries.

As to exactly where YouTube looks, the answer is “everywhere”—everywhere that
contains text, that is. That means youneed to focus on three fields when uploading
or editing your video: tags, title, and description. They all matter, to some degree,
and will affect how your video is ranked when someone is searching for a related
topic.

Choosing the Right Keywords

Whether we’re talking tags, title, or description, you need to determine the right
keywords to use, and then include those keywords in all three fields, as best you
can. It all revolves around the keywords, however.

It’s vital, then, that you learn how to create a list of keywords that best describe your
video, in the way that users will think of and search for that video. It’s a matter of
learning how to think like the customer; you need to get inside the heads of poten-
tial viewers to determine which words they’re using in their queries.

The art of determining which keywords to use is called keyword research, and it’s a
key part of SEO, whether you’re optimizing your complete website or a single
YouTube video. When you know which keywords and phrases that your target cus-
tomers are likely to use, you can optimize the description of your video for those
words and phrases; if you don’t know how they’re searching, you don’t know what
to optimize.