Real Estate SEO and Technology Blog

Many agents are just now realizing the power of video. More importantly, they are realizing the power and flexibility of YouTube video. Why YouTube? Let’s take a look at some statistics:

YouTube Viewership Facts

• YouTube accounts for more than 99% of all videos viewed at Google Sites. This means that if you’re thinking of using another video tool, your audience is going to be very small indeed.
• Google Video accounts for less than 1%. In other words, the second most popular video tool has only 1% market share for Google sites.
• Now lets open this up to all online video sites. YouTube accounted for 84% of all U.S. visits to online video sites in December 2009. Again, where else is there to go but to YouTube?
• Now here is what you’re going to need to know. YouTube does NOT crawl the web. That’s right. Even though it’s owned by Google, it has an entirely different format for searching and retrieving.
• What does this tell us? It means that we need to look into the nuances of how YouTube operates and how we can get our videos seen by the major search engines or through YouTube itself. So let’s take a look at how we optimize a video for YouTube.

Optimizing Videos For YouTube Step 1 – Finding Keyword Phrases

• Think about words people would type to find your video. Think of these in terms of (What, Why, When, Where, Who & How). This will get us started to finding keyword phrases for your video.
• Google AdWords Keyword Tool – Google’s Adwords Keyword Tool is an excellent tool to find out what your audience is using to search. To find this tool, Google this term in Google to find web page. Once you find this tool, you’ll have the opportunity to select either description keywords or phrases, or you can search by website content. I like to use the “Descriptive words or phrases”.
  • Description keywords or phrases
  • Website content
• Get specific. This is where most people miss the boat. They want to use terms like “Denver real estate”, when what they’re really selling is “Denver luxury condos”. If what you want doesn’t come up with many rankings, try shorting the search to “Denver luxury” or “Denver condos”.
• Now the last step in the initial phase is to compare what you come up with, with your competition for the keyword phrase. Often times you’ll find that they’re using better and sometimes worse keyword phrases. We’ll be covering where to find these later on in the webinar.

Optimizing Videos For YouTube Step 2 – Optimizing the Video Page

• Write an optimized Title
  YouTube videos are just like websites in that they have Titles that can be read by YouTube. Thus having a title with good keyword phrases will be critical.
  • 120 characters and spaces (about 20 words)
    YouTube will read up to 120 characters and spaces, which is about 20 words. More than this and the words will go unread.
  • “Russian nesting dolls”
    If you’re familiar with the idea of “Russian nesting dolls”, these are the wooden dolls that fit inside progressively larger and larger dolls. Thus the largest doll contains all of the dolls within it. This analogy is used for our Title situation as follows:Let’s say your video is about a Denver luxury condo. By creating a full Title of say “Spacious Denver luxury condo for sale near the downtown shopping plazas”. And you still have almost 50 characters and spaces left. By combining several descriptive words, not only do you get the biggest keyword phrase, that being the whole title, but also the smaller ones such as “Denver”, “Denver condos”, “Denver luxury condos”, “Denver luxury condos for sale” and so forth.

    I addition, YouTube will mix and match your keyword phrases so that even “Luxury downtown spacious condos in Denver” would also be a perfect match.

• In Definition, use up to 1,000 characters and spaces (about 166 words)
  • Put links into first 120 characters
  • Be clear and specific
• Include several tags for each video

Use up to 120 characters in your tags (up to 20 tags)