If you want to have your videos ranking at the top of YouTube and other video sharing sites, there are certain rules to follow and tricks to keep in mind. These simple guidelines tells you what to do.

By Guest Writer Brandon Leibowitz

YouTube Guidelines

According to YouTube guidelines there are many factors that influence rankings and can help optimize your videos:

• Video title
• Description
• Tags
• Incoming links
• Comments
• Subscribers
• Ratings
• Playlist additions
• Flagging
• Embeds
• Shares
• Age of video
• Views
• Channel views

In other words, like when optimizing a web page, you need to work on all the text surrounding your video to make sure it contains the right keywords in the right proportions (more on this below). You also want to work for a high number of quality sites that host or point to your video.

7 steps to high ranking videos

1. Keyword Research: Pick your keywords carefully. You might want to use a keyword research tool for this. Good keywords are terms that people use when searching the search engines and they are relevant and related to your video. And don’t try to compete with the huge multinational corporations for the most popular keywords. In stead, find a niche and the more complex keywords that go with long tail campaigns. Make sure you don’t stuff too many keywords in your text, like video title and description.
2. Transcripts: Include a transcript of the video as this will give the search engines information about your video. This will give your video text for the search engines to analyze and interpret. It also helps for accessibility issues.
3. RSS Feeds: Create an RSS feed for the URL of your video from services such as www.links2rss.com and then submit your feed to RSS feed directories. You can then use services to ping your videos RSS feed, giving the video exposure across a variety of social networking and bookmarking sites within minutes. The search engines liove to read and analyze RSS feeds so make sure you set one up for each video page, submit it, and then ping it for maximum exposure.
4. Views, Comments and Ratings: The more of these your video has, the higher it will rank. The video sites push up the popular videos while letting the unpopular videos become sandboxed, or lost in the millions of other videos out there.
5. Link Building: Just as with another SEO strategy you always want to build relevant, inbound links. This can be achieved through social networks, link exchanges, or simply posting links in relevant forums. There are many ways to build links, just be creative, but be careful not to spam. And be consistent with the keywords you use in the videos anchor text and links.
6. Video Sharing: Give out your video to as many free resources as possible, provided they link back to the YouTube page. The embed button also allows you to have your video shared on websites. The more exposure and the more websites the video is on the higher it will rank.
7. YouTube Interaction: Once your video is out there, Interact on YouTube by watching other videos, commenting, subscribing, creating channels, and making friends. Interaction helps with the viral marketing, where one person tells another person about the video.

Brandon Leibowitz writes for a social media blog called Bosmol, which has been around for over four years. Subscribe to Bosmol social media and gain valuable exposure. Visit Brandon’s Professional Search Engine Optimization Company website.

photo credit: JVCAmerica