The Ray the Video Guy Ninja Guide to Ranking Online Videos Aka Ray s Jeet By Ray Lane Edited by Steve Sleeper
DISCLAIMER AND/OR LEGAL NOTICES: The information presented herein represents the view of the author as of the date of publication. Because of the rate at which conditions change, the author reserves the right to alter and update his opinion based on new conditions. The report is for informational purpose only. While every attempt has been made to verify the information s provided in this report, neither the author nor his affiliates assume any responsibility for errors, inaccuracies or omissions. Any slights of people and organizations are unintentional. If advice concerning legal or related matters is concerned, the services of a fully qualified professional should be sought. This report is not intended for use as a legal or accounting advice. You should be aware of any laws which govern business transactions or other business practices in your country and state. Any reference to any person or business whether living or dead is purely coincidental. All Rights Reserved No part of this report may be reproduced or transmitted in any form whatsoever, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any informational storage or retrieval without express written, dated and signed permission from the author. On the February 12, 2014 episode of the radio show about video - Video Marketing Madness Ray Lane spent the entire show talking about how to rank your online videos and get real views. What follows is a transcript of that show.
I ve been asked a lot of questions lately about ranking videos, and most specifically about views to their videos. "Gee, my video got removed from YouTube and reset and all my views are gone," and "The URL is different. Why?" In 2012, it was fairly easy to get a video to rank. It was a combination of proper SEO, and your titles, tags and descriptions. Then get a bunch of inflated views and backlinks from Fiverr. The next thing you know, you're on page one. The problem with that is - YouTube's cracking down on the fake views and backlinks. They want to see real views and backlinks. They re removing questionable videos, resetting, and giving them a whole new URL, then setting it on private so it's up to you to re-list that video and start from zero. If you got anything linked to that old URL, you have to fix it. Avoid the Mini Slap Let s talk about how to avoid getting that mini slap and still rank your videos. First step, start off with proper keyword research. If you get this wrong you don t get results. Find a keyword that has traffic and start there. Check competition. Make sure others have done videos but there's no conflict. Let s say, you have a specific keyword you like. You do bit of research and find most of the searches are for a popular song of the same name. No matter how hard you try, you re not going to compete with something already getting 50 million views. When doing keyword research, remember the carpet cleaner example. Is it someone to come to your house, a machine rental, or a spray product? All of those are carpet cleaners. It may get a million searches per month. However if you're selling a spray on carpet cleaning product, and most of the traffic is looking for somebody to come to their house with a truck, then you don't have a million searches. You're wasting your efforts and won t get results. Find a keyword that's more specific. It might be carpet cleaning spray. That's going to give you more accurate results. The riches are in the niches, and the more specific your keyword, the more likely a person is to buy a product. Yes, the Riches are in the Niches Even if your niche has fewer searches, you're better off going for long tail keywords because they're actually more profitable even though they don't have as many natural searches each month. You can also rank a lot quicker. Do multiple videos using longer tail keywords. In the end you have 10 videos, but you might still end up with the same million searchers broken down into 10 keywords, getting 100,000 searches each. By the way Longtail Pro is a good system for doing keyword research.
Next produce a video and name that video with the keywords. If you are looking to rank for the keywords "Plumber in South Bend Indiana", then you want to name your file Plumber in South Bend Indiana.mp4 - or whatever the format happens to be - before you upload it to YouTube. We know YouTube is definitely looking at the keywords inside of the title of the video and that is helping ranking. Another Little Secret Here's another little secret. Not a lot of the courses I've seen teach this and it's something I've actually discovered by mistake. We were creating a bunch of videos for Locksmiths using keyword variations like Locksmith in Las Vegas, Locksmith in Dallas, Texas, Locksmith in Miami, etc. I took the first one which was San Antonio and uploaded it. Then I copied the Locksmith in San Antonio title and pasted it to all the videos I uploaded. After that, I changed the city names for each video. Two days later, all of the videos were indexed for Locksmith in San Antonio. So, even though the title now said "Locksmith in Las Vegas", it had already been indexed as San Antonio on all the videos. It took an extra week before it reindexed. Why? YouTube indexes your videos immediately. So the Ninja part is - upload the video as either "Private" or "Unlisted". Make sure your titles, tags, descriptions and all of that stuff is perfect and in place before you set it to public and YouTube grabs the information. That's going to save you a lot of extra time and effort. It s inside the upload menu, in the center of the big square with the red YouTube logo.
Free Ninja Trick Here s another Ninja trick and it s free. vidiq, a plugin that works in Chrome. It ll show you the tags other people are using in their videos. For instance, do a search on "South Bend Indiana Plumber" and pull up the top videos. Open up a video inside Chrome and there s a pop up that will give you all sorts of information about that video including number of views, number of likes, number of Facebook shares, etc. It will also give you all the tags used. Now you know all the tags the number one video currently uses and you can copy and paste those tags. (Here is Ray's Free Stuff Friday video on vidiq: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oreq8gumhes ) Going back to our South Bend Indiana Plumber, you might want to title it "Plumber in South Bend Indiana Discusses Drain Clogs" or something like that. Point is - Plumber in South Bend Indiana is in the title. That is most crucial part. A software called Tube Assassin will tell you if the high ranking videos used the exact keyword in the title. If it's possible, get the keyword, or a similar keyword in there a second time without it sounding spammy. The next step is work on your description. The way I do descriptions is as follows: I start and end the description with the keyword. The first thing in the description area is the actual keywords; so "Plumber in South Bend Indiana". And the very last thing in description is "Plumber in South Bend Indiana". The reason I do that is because, YouTube, on the view page, only shows the first three lines of your description. If you want to see the rest you have to hit a button that says "more". This will ensure it s indexed all the time whether it's Google or another search engine. Some search engines will truncate the description. So if the first and last bits of the description are the keyword, it's definitely going to show up in their truncated listings.
The next thing in the description is some sort of quick call to action. So for instance, in the case of our "South Bend Indiana Plumber, Plumber in South Bend Indiana", save 20 percent on your next call and then add the website. The website is in one of the first three lines so it always shows up on the page and it s clickable. You also give the viewer a reason to click the link. If you can t offer a discount - give them some sort of reason to go to the website. Include good content in the description. It can be a transcript or summary of the video or an article related to the video. The description block is filled out with good information there s perceived value in the content. Use quality content with links and main and minor keywords If we've got a list of keywords, use them in the description. It s a bit on the spammy side but try to make it seem like it's not. If it s a brick and mortar business, then include the company name, address and phone number; exactly how Google has it in the maps listing. It might be considered a citation. However people can use the info to contact the business. If it s not a local business, then you can skip that step. The next thing is - add "Share this" with the keyword "Video". So "Share This Plumber in South Bend Indiana Video", and then add the URL of the video. So for clarification, when the video is uploaded, grab the link to that video, and paste it into the description. There are a lot of scrapper sites literally posting any video from YouTube relating to plumbing. This will get you some backlinks. Here s How to do a Channel Subscribe Link Next add the subscribe link for your channel. Here is how it works - Use the following URL convention - http://www.youtube.com/subscription_center?add_user=nalts Just replace "nalts" with your own username and you're done. Any users who are logged into YouTube, need only to click that link and then confirm the subscription. Another little Ninja tactic is adding an external link to something important; typically Wikipedia. It s a nice, strong outgoing link to an authority page. And supposedly that helps you rank. Check your closed captions. Whenever you upload a video, there's a transcription in the captions' area that s done through Google's transcription service. Go there and fix any mistakes. The other thing you can do is upload your description as a text file into the transcription area and replace what they've automatically created for you. However I find Google s version is usually good enough. It gets your keywords in there.
We want to take this video and put it into a playlist. In the case of our plumber, if it's on his own channel, he may already have a bunch of other plumbing videos. So maybe create a playlist called "South Bend Indiana Plumbers" and then put the video into that playlist. That s going to provide another opportunity for people to find plumbing videos because a playlist works just like a video in search results. If you've got a good playlist with some videos in it and you titled it properly, there's a good chance the playlist will show up in the search engines, just like a video.
SHARE IT!!!! Then we save the video as public and share it. Ping the video with the URL and keywords at pingler.com or mass-ping.com. It's going to send out that information to the search engines in the hopes that they'll rank it right away. After pinging, go back to YouTube. You'll notice that underneath your information there's a "Share" section which allows you to share your videos to Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Blogger, Reddit, Tumblr, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. You might as well use them. You may need to set up some sites. Set up a blogger page based on "Plumber in South Bend Indiana", for instance. Now we want to get the video out to as many places as we can. I like to use a site called OnlyWire.com. You can set up 50 different bookmarking and sharing sites. Put the information for your video into OnlyWire once and it's going to send that information out to all of those different social media channels. That's pretty much enough to get to page one for a lot good keywords.
You may want order Fiverr gigs like, Wiki backlinks, edu backlinks, etc. There's still a lot of dispute over whether they actually help. However I've found that when a video is struggling, it helps. I've never had a video get hurt by doing that. When in doubt, test it. Also Traffic Geyser - or similar tools - uploads a copy of the video for you automatically to the other sharing sites. Use the URL of your original YouTube video as the link. It s more backlinks for your original video. If you don't want to invest in those softwares, there are guys on Fiverr doing it well. Ray Gets Controversial Let's get into the controversial part - getting views to your videos. In the old days you could run over to Fiverr and pay five bucks and get 20,000 views. Robots would, "watch your video". If your video was three minutes, bots will only watch them for two or three seconds and go away. In the old days, this was great because it got your video on page one and it looked like it was hugely popular because it had 20,000 views. However YouTube changed the way they deal with views. Just having a large number of views doesn t necessarily help. If your video is three minutes long and you've got 20,000 views and they're all three to five seconds long, the signal sent to YouTube is, "Nobody likes this video, they re going away after only three seconds." YouTube wants people to stay on their site as long as possible and when it looks like is your video is causing people to leave, it s not a good. So, your video can actually plummet in the rankings because it's not relevant. If you got a three-minute video, you want to focus on getting views that are two or three minutes; making sure people watch as much of the video as possible. The higher your retention, the better. Let s say there are two videos; one's with 20,000 three-second views, and the other with 300 three-minute views; chances are the video with 300 views is going to outrank the video with 20,000 views because it seems to be more relevant to the person searching. Make sure you re encouraging people to view the video all the way through. YouTube has become very adept at spotting fake views from Bots. If you are using Fiverr, chances are these people are using Bots that are going to get your video pulled. A dirty little secret and I almost hesitate to say this - but Vagex seems to be unaffected so far. Be careful how many views you drive. If you're a plumber in South Bend Indiana and there are 300 searches monthly on that keyword and your video has 10 thousand views in two days; something doesn't match up. It s a red flag. The reason Vagex hasn t been hammered by Google is technically - it s not fake views. They're supposedly following the terms of service of YouTube. Vagex is not
providing any views to your video. They're recruiting people to watch the videos from different places. When you get a view through Vagex, it's actually a person somewhere in the world watching the video. They have a web browser open playing videos, and they're off somewhere else. But the videos are being watched albeit automatically. The 301 View Stall You may notice video views stall out at 300. YouTube has different servers around the world. They may have one in the United States and one in Brazil and Spain and England, etc. You might be getting 50 views from Brazil, 100 from the US, 100 from Canada, 30 from England, etc. They're not going to report at the same time. YouTube's algorithms stop at 300 views and check everything out. They're pausing to verify all the views coming in from different places and to add them up. Almost every video is going to stop at 301 for at least a short period. Some will get stuck on that for a long time. When your video stops at 301, don't think, "Oh, oh, they're on to me. That s not the case. Every video technically will stop at 301. It's built in to the system. AdWords What? What to know how to get more quality views to your videos for $5? AdWords. I know a lot of people are scared of Google AdWords. It's complex and a terrible system as far as going through and using it. It's not like buying ads on Facebook which is easy. But your video is going to get views from people actually searching for you, not just people that are getting credits for watching videos. So they're more likely to purchase and Google and YouTube are going to like you because you re paying them. They have an incentive to get people to watch your videos. It's very easy to do. Just go to your video manager inside of YouTube, go to the video you'd like to promote and hit the little drop down and it will say, "Promote" and go through the process. If you don't have an AdWords account yet, set it up though the Gmail account associated with the YouTube channel.
Recently I tested a video I did for Todd Gross' Green Screen Profit, I put the $5 in and in the first day, we got 328 views and we made about $300 directly. It's very effective and it works well. And another thing you can do is Facebook ads for your video. But make sure you can project an ROI before you spend the money. With affiliate videos, it's fairly easy to figure out what the ROI will be. Every Wednesday at 2 pm eastern, be sure to listen to the radio show about video - Video Marketing Madness with Ray the Video Guy. Stay updated on the latest trends in Video, YouTube and Internet Marketing. We answer your questions about how to use YouTube and Video to grow your business. We bring in top guests in the Internet marketing world and deliver the online marketing news of the week. Listen live or podcast at: BlogTalkRadio/RaytheVideoGuy And don't forget about Ray's Free Stuff Friday. Ray the Video Guy unveils another free video marketing tool Fridays at YouTube.com/RaytheVideoGuy