Do you want to get more views on your YouTube videos?
YouTube gives you a number of tools to help attract more views – titles, tags, thumbnails and descriptions. Today we are going to focus on descriptions, which need to work both for search engines and for viewers.
When you click on any video, you will see only the first three lines of that video’s description by default. To read everything else under that, you need to click ‘SHOW MORE’.
‘This is something you need to take note of because not everyone really clicks the ‘SHOW MORE’, so you want to make sure you have some key information up there.
How to make great YouTube descriptions
1. Restate the title. The first thing in this description is that the first sentence generally reflects what the title is. Use similar words, but make them slightly different.
This lets Google know that your video is about the same thing that your title is about and lets your viewers know that they can feel confident about clicking on your video.
2. Have a clickable URL. Start with http:// and then the website that you want people to click through to. If there is a blog post that’s specific for your video, include that entire blog post here.
3. One-sentence description. Provide a keyword-loaded sentence that sums up the entire video. Make sure to add a blank space after this.
4. Accurate description of your video. You want to make sure that your video description is accurate, so don’t try to use keywords that have nothing to do with your video (e.g. “cute little kitten”) to avoid a bunch of thumbs downs for your video.
You can transcribe your video and include that in the description – that’s a great way to load up with all the keywords, everything that you talked about in your video would be available for Google to search and for people to see if they want to read what’s in your video.
5. Timing links. This is a great little tip for when you have longer videos and you have some very specific points you want people to be able to click directly through to. All you have to do is add a time stamp in this format – mm:ss – and YouTube will automatically set up the timing link for you.
6. ‘Share this video’ link. Make it easy for people to share your video by including a link for social sharing.
7. Link to playlists. You can include links to playlists on your channel that you want people to click on.
8. Invitation to leave comments and subscribe. Encourage your viewers to leave comments on your video. Also include a link for them to subscribe to your channel in this format:
https://www.youtube.com/user/JoinSubscriberNation?sub_confirmation=1
Just replace JoinSubscriberNation with your channel name.
9. Links to other social media accounts. If you are on Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn, etc, you can put a link to your social media profile here as well so your audience can connect with you.
10. Free offer. If this is a business for you, you may want to send your viewers back to your website. Grow your email list by giving away a free product and having them sign up for it.
These are all the steps you need to have a great YouTube description.