A few tips and tricks I’ve learnt during my time on YouTube.

Title
One of the most important things to take care of is the title of your video. Sticking to a defined structure helps for regular viewers to recognize your videos, as well as new viewers to pick out your content above others. For example, I like to use the following structure for titles.

  Main Heading – Video Type
e.g.
White 16GB iPhone 3GS – Review

Description
The description for each video should be no loner than 140 characters. It’s not often that people read these, but they’re used for SEO within YouTube.
If you’re planning on including any links within the description, you should include these first, as they will then appear above the fold.

Playlists
All relevant videos should be grouped together into a playlist, as this playlist grouping is then shown on the video page, adding yet more links to your videos from the watch page.

Series Pass
A series is a playlist of videos that are part of a continuing list of planned videos. Perfect for news videos and/or videos specific to a category. When possible, you should also activate playlists as a ‘Series’ as this will also add an additional tab to the watch page.

Tags            
People have a tendency to plaster their videos with irrelevant tags, which ultimately makes their video irrelevant in the listings. Generally, it’s safe to keep to a limit of 6-8 tags per video, making sure that the words you use are the most relevant to that particular videos content. Honing in on exactly the right keywords means that your videos will appear for associated searches, as appose to ones for “Paris Hilton, Hubba Hubba”

Overlays
There are several types of overlays available as part of the YouTube control panel. When positioning overlays, it’s important to avoid overlapping with areas of the player that are intended for displaying in-video ads. The example below is a template that should be used as a template of the best size and position for overlays.

The benefit of adding these overlays is the fact that it allows your viewers to quickly and easily jump between videos. Timing is important, don’t show the overlay boxes until the last 30 seconds of a video.

Questions? Ask.