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Just like any search engine, youtube has its own specific search engine that delivers the right content to the right customers.  Also, like any content, video must be specifically formatted to raise visitor engagement and reduce bounce rate to score higher on ranking.  Once again, the goal of optimization is to appear on the first page at the top by increasing your content’s score based on Youtube’s algorithm.  If you are not using the right keywords for example for your video, your visitors will leave very quickly after clicking your video, ultimately resulting in your ranking score to fall.  Organic search and being recommended is critical for not only your videos but for your channel and it should follow a structured system to ensure you increase traffic.   

Before putting in the effort of creating your video, you should at least do keyword research.  You will be able to identify things like traffic volume and details on your competitors.  From the research, you should find out your target audience information like demographics, age groups, and so on, what keywords are the most relevant to that audience, what thumbnails may be attractive for them, the type of marketing that works for them, what gets them to subscribe, and so forth. 

To optimize your content, recommendations are as follows: 

1. Title your video using “researched keyword”, preferably long tail keyword.  If you do not understand what long tail is versus short tail, click here. 
2. Optimize your video description.  Youtube only displays the first two or three lines of text until you must click show more to see the rest, but you are welcomed to include up to 1000 characters. 
3. Tag your video with popular keywords that is related to your video to include hashtags.  Make sure you choose the right keywords, or you’ll be penalized, and you’ll fall lower in ranking. 
4. Upload custom thumbnail that is unique and relative.  You must be verified, and you are capped out at 2MB or smaller. 
5. Use SRT to add subtitles and closed captions.  SubRip File Format include the text of the subtitles in sequence, along with the start and end timecodes. 
6. Create playlists if you have multiple videos on same category. 
7. Leave a pinned comment on your own video to engage with the community. 
8. Analyze and adjust. 

It’s critical to analyze things like watch time to get objective view of how engaging it is, average percentage viewed to measure video’s ability to hold attention of the viewers, retention to see where you are losing viewers’ attention, re-watches to see what part of the video is the most engaging, impressions click through rate to measure your video’s ability to prompt people to watch your video after seeing it on their homepage, recommendation section, or trending section, demographics and traffic sources to see where your traffic is coming from, so you can see where you are lacking at or good at, and so forth.  Tubebuddy and VidIQ are some tools you can use to assist with optimization.