Here are our top 5 tips to get your views up on YouTube, and make it easier for people to find you, and your wonderful musical sounds.
YouTube is the the second biggest search engine in the world, which means that in terms of success and reach online, it’s very important that artists understand how to use the tools it offers effectively, optimizing the chance of people finding their videos.
Speaking at a YouTube event, Ryan Nugent said that, “Fifty per cent of the work is making a great video, and the other fifty per cent is what you do when you upload it”, meaning that even if you have a brilliant video, people aren’t going to find it unless you get the metadata side of it correct.
Let’s start by clearing up a few terms – ‘metadata‘ simply means the title, tags and description of your video. It’s paramount that these are all used in the most effective way, so that your video can be easily found in a search.
Now, because YouTube is a part of Google, it uses Google ‘algorithms‘ , which basically means when someone searches for a keyword(s) on YouTube, it trawls through all the titles, tags and descriptions of every video on the site, and returns the most relevant results to the viewer. Therefore it’s very important to get your keywords correct, to optimise your video coming up in search results.
So, here are the top five ways that artists can use metadata to optimize their YouTube views:
1.Tags – For artists, the title of your videos is going to be pretty straightforward, your name or band’s name, and then the song. But with the tags you can be a bit more creative. YouTube gives you 120 characters to put as many keywords in as you can, and it’s important to fill all the space – the more words, the more chance the algorithm will pick your video up. The words you use should be a mix of common and specific words, for example if you’re in an indie band, common words would be ‘music’, ‘indie’ and ‘band’. The more specific words would be along the lines of any sub-genres you have, e.g. ‘electro’ if you are an indie-electro band, and instruments like ‘guitar’ and ‘synth’. It’s also a good idea for your first tags to be the words in the title of the video, in order, for even better optimisation.
