YouTube’s Best Kept Secrets for Better SEO by Phyllis Khare

YouTube has enjoyed several big leaps in evolution in the last five years. Currently, they are redesigning and re-organizing almost everything about their service (again). What was once just a place for insanely creative college kids to upload their latest creation; YouTube will expanding to launch 100 new professionally produced TV channels (from the likes of Madonna and Ashton Kutcher) for free -- supported by Google’s ad system of course. Before that new expansion takes place (early 2012) there are already 800,000,000 people world-wide who visit YouTube each month. And approximately 120 million of those people live in the US. And here’s the part that blows my mind -- over 3 billion videos are viewed each day! That’s a 50% increase over 2010. I can’t wait to see the final numbers for 2011. And can you imagine what it will be after all these new TV channels get rolling? I’m sure the numbers will be off the charts. You might be asking “Who’s watching all these videos?” YouTube has created a great resource in understand the demographics of their audience. Start here http://www.youtube.com/advertise/demographics.html to see the whole story.

Most business people I know, who upload videos to YouTube, don’t realize the deeper mechanics they can use to help their videos be found among more than 24 hours of video that are uploaded every minute! The two most powerful tasks you can do, is to create a correct closed caption script and to add annotations. Let’s look at these two best kept secrets you can easily learn to do.

Creating Closed Captioning and an Interactive Transcript This is where I want to rock your video world. Or at least that’s what people tell me I do when I explain this process to them! I’m going to teach you how to create closed captioning on your videos, and create an interactive transcript to not only make your videos available to the hearing impaired, but to increase the search engine optimization of your videos all in one process. Don’t confuse transcriptions with captions. Transcriptions are the text of the words spoken during a video with a timestamp. Captions (or subtitles) are on-screen text designed for the hearing-impaired. On a YouTube video you will see the red CC icon if closed captioning is available for the video.

YouTube automatically tries to create a closed captioning script so that your video can be enjoyed by the hearing-impaired. If your video has speech, this process happens automatically. The very cool thing about this free service is if it worked properly you would have closed captioning on all your uploaded videos automatically. Notice I said “if” it worked properly. YouTube tries, using Google’s speech recognition technology, but the end result is made for comedy. YouTube’s auto process is so bad, in fact, that one of YouTube’s classic creators Rhett and Link create videos that use these auto-generated captions to great comedic effect. It’s worth the watch. (Click the image.) Or go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23H8IdaS3tk

If you do not upload the actual words you are saying on your video for the closed captioning service, YouTube will attempt to transcribe the video for you. Go to any video on YouTube and look for the red CC icon near the bottom right of the video. When you click that icon, if you see a box with these words, “Transcribe audio is an experimental service that uses Google’s speech recognition technologies to provide automated captions.” and you click OK, you need to know that the closed captioning is auto-generated. You don’t want this to happen to your videos. If you don’t get the disclaimer box, that means the owner of the video uploaded their own text to provide the closed captioning. This is what you want to upload - the correct words you are saying so YouTube can render them to your video so the resulting closed caption script matches what you are actually saying. If you already have a lot of videos uploaded to YouTube, you might want to consider outsourcing this speech transcription task, as it can take awhile to do each video. I have found, in my experience that it takes about 5+ minutes of work to each 1 minute of video. Here’s the process to create closed captioning for your videos. Creating Closed Captioning for your videos

To create a closed caption script, follow these steps: 1. Open Notepad (or any other text file programs) and type the words you are speaking as you listen to your video. Save the edited Notepad file to your computer.

2. Log into your account on YouTube. Click the top right dropdown and select My Videos.

3. Click the Edit Info button under the video you are working on. Then select the Captions and Subtitles Tab. Click the Add New Captions or Transcript button.

4. Now choose your Notepad file from your computer, select the radio button called “Transcript file beta” (This is an important step, unless you have created a time-stamped file using special software), select the language, and click Upload file. Now YouTube will attempt to put the script together with the speech of your video. It might take awhile for your file to upload depending on the length of your transcript.

5. Once YouTube says it is done, click the “View on video page” link and review your video to make sure the words are lining up with the speech on your video. On this video page look for the Transcription icon, as you see in the image. Click that and enjoy an interactive transcript, too.

If, in reviewing the closed captioning and transcript, something is wrong (typos, wrong words, punctuation etc.) you will need to go back to the Captions and Transcript tab and upload a corrected Notepad file. Once the new one is uploaded you’ll need to select it as the one for YouTube to use on your video. Now, in your video list, the CC icon will be next to the video title, so you’ll know you have completed this task for that video.

Adding Annotations to Create Calls to Action Now that you understand what closed captioning looks like on a video, let’s look at annotations. Annotations are text that is added to the top of a video after it is uploaded. These annotation layers can be hyperlinked, but only to places inside YouTube itself. You will not be able to hyperlink them to your website or Facebook Page. You can put the text URL of those places, but you can’t hyperlink them to go there unfortunately. Most people think annotations are just speech clouds with funny comments in them, but annotations can be very sophisticated and it’s extremely important to add them to help viewers take a next step. Annotation are generally used to create a call to action, or a next-step link, as you can see in the image from one of my favorite creators on YouTube, and master of the annotation MysteryGuitarMan http://www.youtube.com/user/MysteryGuitarMan When you visit his channel, make sure you click on the playlist called “Animation” to see his brilliant editing skills!

Those four things pointed out in the image above are also annotations. He puts video samples onto his video before he uploads it to YouTube, then he adds an annotation with a link to that video already on his channel. This is an advanced use of annotations. I think it’s best to start with a simple annotation. Follow these steps to create your own calls to action: 1. Log into your YouTube account and click the dropdown arrow and select My Videos. 2. Click the Edit Info button under the video you want to work on.

3. Click the Annotations tab.

4. Click the Add Annotations dropdown arrow and select the type you want to add. For this example, choose Speech Bubble. 5. Type in the text you want to show up in the bubble. Notice there are several things you can adjust; the size of the font, the background color of the bubble and the length of time it appears on the video. Drag the edges of the placement in the timeline to adjust where it shows up and how long it stays on the video.

6. If you want the bubble hyperlinked, click the Link checkbox and the dropdown to select which type you want.

7. Once you have everything where you want it, click the blue Publish button. Now you will have annotation that can help someone click through to the next step, the next video, or the next Channel.

You also need to know that YouTube gives users the option to Hide Annotations, but most people don’t realize they can do this step. If your demographic is under 30 years old, though, you need to know they might turn off those annotations by clicking a little tiny icon (a red cloud) at the bottom of your video.

There are some really good examples of YouTube Channels that understand how to use closed captioning and annotations to enhance their videos. Here are a few of my favorites: Vlogbrothers http://www.youtube.com/vlogbrothers eMarketingVids http://www.youtube.com/emarketingvids And as a last highly recommended site, there is a company called Revision3 that has over 15 YouTube Channels under its umbrella. http://www.youtube.com/revision3

In Summary Now you know how to do two very important tasks to rock the SEO of your videos; adding closed captioning and including annotations. I hope you take these extra steps each time you upload a video to your YouTube Channel. You will see better SEO because you have basically doubled the keywords Google can now use to find your video. There are other important tasks that will help SEO, too, like adding your keywords to your video description, but that’s another article for another time! If you haven’t jumped into YouTube, yet, I hope this article inspires you to take the leap. When you do, send me your Channel URL I’d love to take a look!

BIO: Phyllis is the author of two comprehensive books on social media marketing; Social Media Marketing eLearning Kit for Dummies (a 4-color book with DVD and online learning environment) and co-author of Facebook Marketing All-In-One for Dummies - See all her publications here http://ow.ly/7n6pL Phyllis has been a featured guest on Social Media Examiner, eMarketingVids and Social Media Manners Twitter Events. Columnist and Social Media strategist for iPhone Life magazine at http://iphonelife.com., Phyllis is a dynamic speaker and trainer – memorable and engaging for all social technology events. Contact her directly [email protected].