Video marketing is a powerful tool for bringing targeted traffic to your sites. Now days, the very low cost Flip and Kodak cameras make video marketing extremely easy.

But just getting a video published is not the main point; you need it watched too!

When you first publish a video to YouTube, all Google has to go by for ranking it is the title, the description and the keywords. They do not watch the video. It could be a very bad video and still rank well in the beginning so long as the title, description, and keywords are optimized well.

However, if they do rank it well in the beginning, and it is a bad video, people will not watch it all the way through. If it is a 2 minute video and most people only watch 5 seconds of it, Google will know that it must be a poor video to show for that search and they will lower it in the rankings.

Therefore, you have to create a great video people will watch AND you have to optimize it well in order for it to rank well in the beginning.

Of course the title has to be keyword targeted. But the description is important too. Far too many people only offer a one or two line description. It should be AT LEAST 200 words. YouTube will allow you to write a full article for the description. Many people write a 500+ word, well optimized article for the description. I’m not implying that you HAVE to write a long article for the description, but write more than a few lines for sure.

Also, most people do not do the very simple step of having the FULL URL first in the description. If you put the full URL (beginning with http://), YouTube will make it a hyper-link. No, it is not a do-follow link (so it does not help with backlinking), but it is a way to get a LOT of traffic to your site. ALWAYS add your full URL to the beginning of the description.

You can see the full description of a video by clicking the arrow button I have indicated below. Remember, a long description is not really for the human benefit. It is more for getting the attention of YouTube and Google for ranking purposes.

Also, keep most of your videos under 2 to 3 minutes when possible. It is difficult to keep someone interested for longer. Sometimes, for some topics, a longer video is required. However, shorter is usually best.

With today’s technology, it’s possible to shoot a short video and have it optimized and published in 20 minutes or less. Why not commit to doing just 2 or 3 videos a week? Imagine in a year’s time the traffic those videos alone would bring to your site!

Example of how your site’s link should appear on the YouTube site: