Learning about SEO and YouTube

As the newest Intern I was invited by the ladies of Brand Eleven Eleven to attend a my first SEO seminar; “Increasing your SEO using YouTube”, sponsored by Florida Public Relations Association (FPRA) and held at the Meadows Country Club. The speaker was Maggie Lacher, the Regional Marketing Director for Florida Radiation Oncology Group and she was fabulous! I learned a great deal about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) in general, but also how to use YouTube as a marketing tool and maxing out it’s potential. Who knew that search engines really crawl the full depths of YouTube? And if all the titles, descriptions and fields are worded correctly (maximizing all the keywords relevant to your video) that you could really drive traffic to see your videos and potentially to the website of your choice.

Maggie was a great speaker and provided a ton of tips and suggestions. Starting with the title of the video – use an attention getting title that also contains 1 or 2 major keywords and is an accurate description of the video. Wow, that can be tough at times, but is essential to catch traffic. Completing the Description section is equally important, but who knew that the way you word this section could attract or discourage searches? Maggie specializes in cancer so her example was this: instead of using “lung, breast, and prostate cancer” in her description she would word it this way “lung cancer, breast cancer, and prostate cancer” because that is how users search for information. If someone was searching for information about breast cancer and typed it into the search engine that way, the first part of the example would be missed, but the second part of the example would be found.

I didn’t know that Google or YouTube penalized websites for what they perceive as bad behavior or etiquette, they do this by placing your website or video lower on the search list or dropping your site or video completely. Some of that bad behavior is using keywords or phrases that have nothing to do with your site or video, inappropriate content, broken links, or something as simple as not updating the site. Starting and stopping videos can decrease a video’s ranking in the search engine searches. If a video is started but quickly stopped, it tells the search engine that it was not relevant to that search, so therefore it gets dropped further down the list.

Something that I found very interesting, YouTube videos have a section for adding Closed Captions for the hearing impaired. The reason this stood out to me, one of my classmates at SCF is deaf and he has an interpreter that follows him to every class signing what is said. I hadn’t really given deafness any series thought till I started taking classes with him; trying to communicate can be challenging. I remember my web coding teachers often mentioned using tags on photos for the hearing impaired. Well, not only are these items nice so everyone can participate, but search engines and YouTube really use these items to help with searches. In fact, the Closed Captions section is crawled by Google, it’s considered an important section, but it often left empty by video creators.

I’m glad a went, I felted like I walked away with a lot of useful information that I will be able to able to my future career in the web industry. I hadn’t heard of FPRA before, now that I am aware of them I will keep an eye out for future seminars; they have a Media Relations Workshop toward the end of February that may be interesting. I’ll keep you posted.