 Video SEO secrets, how to rank YouTube videos on Google. Hey guys, you wanna get your video ranked? You came to the right video, okay? Because this one here is gonna show you the steps you need to go through. And they're simple and easy. These things are not hard to do. By the end of this video, you'll know exactly how to rank your video on Google so that you get more views. Do me a favor though, since I've given you that information. Give me a thumbs up if you would. And don't forget to subscribe. Hit that subscribe button down there. Turn it from red to gray and ring the bell. The bell, the notification bell. Make sure you turn on all notifications so you're notified each and every time I go live or if I upload a video. Now let's get right into this. This is simple stuff. You're gonna know how to do this in no time. First off, let's talk about what SEO is. SEO is nothing more than search engine optimization. Now, search engine optimization allows results to come back to you when you search in Google such as your videos. And there's certain steps you need to do to your video to get them to rank. Let's walk you through about five steps so that you can get this done simple and easy. Step one, you wanna make videos that have traffic potential. What are traffic potential? Well, we break it down two ways. Number one is they have to be searching for that particular subject matter, okay? That's the first thing. And number two, they have to want to watch it in a video form as opposed to reading it. So does your content match those two things? Now, certain things just kinda lend themselves. Like if I wanna see a recipe, I'm probably gonna wanna watch a video on it because it's gonna be pretty interesting rather than just read a recipe. There's tons of recipes online but to actually watch a video on one, that's a whole lot more interesting. So I watch a lot of videos on that subject matter. So when you're thinking about making your video, you wanna think in advance. You don't wanna make a video and think about how to market it. You wanna think, what are people searching for? What will they watch? And I'll make a video on that. Now, there's several tools you can use to do that. I like TubeBuddy. I will put a link below where you can actually get a free account at TubeBuddy that will help you with all these steps. I'm gonna walk you through here. But get TubeBuddy. It's a tool that really is invaluable when you're making videos and putting them on YouTube and you wanna get them ranked. This is the tool you wanna use. Like I said, there's a link below for TubeBuddy. Click on it and you can get the software absolutely free. If you wanna get the upgraded version, it will also give you 20% off the upgraded version, but you certainly don't have to. You could just use the free one if you choose. Step number two, create an optimized video, okay? You wanna an optimized video. What do I mean by optimized? You wanna have all your keywords in place. You wanna have your titles in place. You wanna have your thumbnails in place so that all these things work together to get you more views. You wanna optimize the video. And once again, I'm gonna refer back to TubeBuddy. TubeBuddy is excellent for that. It's really good. You can actually make thumbnails in there. You can figure out your titles. You can figure out your keywords. You can put your tags in there. And you can do all of that for absolutely free. So don't forget, grab TubeBuddy while you're watching this video. It's in the description below. You're just gonna love me for this. It's an absolute game changer. You don't have to think about this. Somebody else has already done it and they put it into some software. So you wanna create an optimized video. That's step number two. Step number three is next. Step number three is closed captions. Closed captions. What's closed captions? Closed captions, if you notice on the bottom of a video on YouTube, you have a little CC button. If you click on it, the words actually pop up on the bottom of the screen that the person is saying on the screen. So this is super important because there's a lot of hearing impaired people. But it's not just hearing impaired people. And plus the fact that, you know, why wouldn't you want it for hearing impaired people? Okay, you need to get your message out to everybody, but it's not just hearing impaired people that closed captions are good for. How many times have you been in a meeting or with somebody and you're looking at your phone and you see a video you'd like to watch and you'd like to get the information, but you don't wanna be playing it as they're talking. You don't wanna be playing it in a meeting, but you can hit the closed caption and you can look down at the words and you could be reading it. And a lot of people do that. You'll be amazed how many people in an airport, in a boardroom with their friends or whatever are looking down at a video and they're actually reading what is on the video. So that's gonna get you more views if you have the closed captions. And if you don't, it's gonna cost you. Step four, have a great thumbnail. What's a thumbnail? A thumbnail is what you're gonna see when you search through YouTube, a picture of that video all through YouTube, okay? You're gonna see that on every single video. Now, if you do not upload a thumbnail, you'll still have a thumbnail. It's just not gonna be a good one. And here's why. What YouTube does is they take a screen capture from part of your video and you'd never know what part. It does give you the opportunity to select the one. It'll give you a few choices. But that's gonna be your thumbnail. And normally, those are not very good. Those don't really stand out. You want a thumbnail that really stands out, that really looks good. And once again, I'm gonna get back to TubeBuddy because you could use TubeBuddy for that. And this is free, guys. If you haven't grabbed TubeBuddy yet, you need to do it. But you could use TubeBuddy to create that free thumbnail. Or you could have a graphic artist do it. Or maybe you're artistic and you can do it. But please, and I know, I know, I know, I didn't do this in the beginning, please create thumbnails. In the beginning, I didn't do it. It cost me so many views. And I was making videos and not getting any views. So I was putting out all that work for nothing. Make sure you have great thumbnails. Let me just show you this one real quick. When you're doing your thumbnails, make sure it's congruent with whatever your message is. And I wanna show you one on the screen in just a second. But make sure that it really kind of brings across exactly what your video is about. Now, this thumbnail here that I'm putting on the screen right now is how to tie a knot. And if you notice, it says how to tie a knot. Mirrored slowly. So it's gonna slowly show you how to tie a knot. That's exactly what you wanted, right? That's what you searched for. That's what you expect. That's a good thumbnail. Now, check out the thumbnail I've got on the screen now. This is a bad thumbnail. Why? Because it doesn't really demonstrate how to tie a knot. It's got some kid there. And you can't even tell if he's wearing a tie. Not a good thumbnail. Let me show you one more example here before we move on to the last step. This is how to learn SEO. That's what this video is about, how to learn SEO fast and effectively. And the thumbnail just says learn SEO. Now, I go back and forth on whether I want words on my thumbnails or not. And I think some videos need one or two words, whereas others don't need any words. And keep in mind, the words on your thumbnail do not have to match with the title of your video is. In this example here, it just says learn SEO, okay? That's not even a full title. But I would always recommend that you only put two or three words on a thumbnail. Too many words on there is gonna be difficult to read. And keep in mind, most people are watching your videos on mobile devices. And if they're scrolling through with their thumb on their phone, they won't see a whole bunch of words. So you're wasting your time and it's a bad thumbnail. And step number five is add timestamps. Now, what is a timestamp? YouTube has this really cool tool where if you put the time of, let's say one minute, 31 seconds, and you type that in your description, they will convert that into a clickable link. You don't have to do anything, but figure out at what point you wanna put your timestamps. So maybe you have the 10 steps to riding a horse, okay? And one of them is, you know, get your saddle, get a horse, whatever it is. And you can put those timestamps so that when people click on it, they can go to that time on your video. This is unbelievably helpful because a lot of people will look at a video and then they look down in the description to see if it has timestamps to see if any of the items are on there that they wanna watch. Now, probably they are because they're already interested in the video, but if the timestamp isn't there, they're not gonna be able to click on it. So it's so, so important to do that. And it's a free tool that's built into YouTube. You don't have to buy anything, you don't have to do anything. The only thing you have to do is know where that situation's gonna happen or when that step's gonna happen and you can put it in your description. Now, right here, I'm gonna put one of my videos up and I'm gonna show you what those timestamps look like. And as you can see, each one of those timestamps is a clickable link and you can click and go to that time in the video. This is super helpful to somebody viewing your videos. You just gotta do it. Okay, let me give you a few rules for timestamps that you don't wanna just stick them all over. You wanna do it in this order. So the first one is add timestamps to the video in the description. Don't place it in a pinned comment. Don't do that, okay? Place each timestamp on a new line. Specify the label on the same line. Also, keep the label brief but descriptive. Your label should be a direct statement of what the section is about. Not put in pasta in the pan and cook it for 10 or 15 minutes. It should be something like boil the pasta, okay? That's what you should do. Next thing is list the timestamps in chronological order. I don't know why I have to tell you this but I've seen people do this wrong. Don't add a timestamp for something at the end of your video before earlier points in the video. It makes no sense. Also, keep labels to around 40 characters or less. Google truncates any longer ones. So keep that in mind. Don't add too many timestamps. Google hasn't mentioned a maximum or minimum number of timestamps but they'll show in the search results. However, it's unlikely that they'll show a carousel with hundreds of them. I don't think it's gonna happen. And who wants to read those anyhow? They might as well just watch the video. As a general rule of thumb, we'd recommend no more than 10 timestamps for video. Align the on-screen content with the label. If your label says chop the onion, try to add the timestamp when you're visibly chopping the onion on the screen. In other words, they need to match up. So those five steps should really help you. I do wanna kinda give you a bonus here though. If you've got a page that's ranking really high on Google, get your video embedded on that page because it's gonna get it in front of more people. And of course, the other bonus is list your videos on social media. Put your videos out there where people can see them. I think that's a big mistake that a lot of people make is they make a YouTube video and that's the only place that ever lives is on YouTube. You know, I see so many really top recipe guys. They'll have a recipe page and they have what click here to get all the ingredients and they have that video also on that recipe page that you just watched. So it's in a couple different places. And don't forget to use playlist. These are all my bonuses, I got too many. But playlists are great guys. So let's say that you're into cooking and you do barbecue recipes, you do Asian recipes, you do Italian recipes. Make playlist for each one of those and add that video to this playlist. When you add a video to a playlist, it actually creates another URL outside of the main one that's on your channel. So now you've got two URLs and you've doubled your SEO. And yes, you could put it in two playlist and you could put it in three or four playlist. Just make sure it matches whatever the playlist description is. You could certainly take a barbecue video and put it in barbecue videos and outdoor cooking. You could do that. And you could also put it in a grilling playlist. So now you've got four URLs for that one video. All these things are gonna help you get more views guys. Please put them into place. And I know some of it's a little complicated. And if it is to you, please put a question below. If you've had some success with this, I'd love to hear about it. Put that in the comments below too. Tell me your story, introduce yourself. If you have any other subjects you'd like to hear videos on, feel free to put it in the comments section below. Thank you so much for watching this video. Don't forget to subscribe if you haven't done it so far. Click that subscribe button there. Turn it from red to gray. Don't forget to give me a thumbs up. Thumbs ups are really good. And ring the bell. Turn on all bell notifications so you're notified each and every time I go live or if I upload a video. Thank you so much. And I'll see you in the next video.