Second only to Google, YouTube receives an astonishing number of search requests every single day. As such, more and more content creators are realizing the power it offers as a content platform. Not only can you distribute existing content in a completely different format, but you can also bolster your existing website’s search notoriety by it being associated with a very popular, Google-owned platform. How exactly can you improve optimization of your YouTube channel to extract these desired benefits? Below, we’ll review a few simple tips that can help send your YouTube channel into overdrive and create the effects you desire.

Picking the Right Name

Your YouTube channel name can convey a lot of information about its purpose in just a few words – both to visitors and to search engines. This name will appear not only in search engines, but also in YouTube search results and suggested channel results. Because of this, you want to be sure that you are pinging links with relevant information about your brand and its offerings. Despite what we’ve learned with regards to SEO in other arenas, you want to be sure that your channel name differs in some degree when compared to your channel URL. Above all else, pick a YouTube channel name that is short, conveys relevance and is easy for visitors to remember.

Promote Subscriptions

Much like with most search and social signals across the web, your performance in search will be linked in large part to the number of people who interact with your YouTube channel. Because of this, promoting the subscribe feature is a key selling point for many successful YouTubers. You’ll notice that in many videos, vloggers promote the subscription option in multiple ways: they’ll put a link directly in the video asking to subscribe, they’ll mention it overtly and direct users to click the subscribe button below the video, and they may also include a link in each video’s description. All of these tactics should be employed, as should others: you can ask users to subscribe directly from your website and via social media as well.

Tinkering with Aesthetics

Another great way to improve overall reception of your YouTube channel – but not necessarily the technical aspects – is to make sure that you are accommodating the aesthetic elements. This ranges from channel art and icons to individualized thumbnails for each video. The most popular YouTube channels on the network use individualized thumbnails to catch the eyes of people who are searching for what they have, with great effect. In addition to the more obvious aesthetic considerations, you’ll also want to be sure to provide detailed descriptions in your channel info and video info sections; this is an opportunity to both better summarize the purpose of the channel/videos and for pinging links back to your website.

Conclusion

There are many different ways to improve overall performance of your YouTube channel, with three listed above. Starting out, a more optimized channel on YouTube can be obtained by promoting subscriptions and expanding your viewer base, improving aesthetics to increase brand recognition and appeal, and picking the right name that will draw in users and please search engines. With these decisions made properly, you can then spend more time focusing on the meat and potatoes of video content!