Today my odyssey into SEO for authors continues with a few tricks to improve your visibility on YouTube. 

Most of you all already know YouTube is a video sharing site where users can watch everything from personal video blogs, movie clips, music videos and even book trailers.  If you’ve tinkered with the idea of using YouTube or creating a book trailer you should consider it.  YouTube is the most used search engine behind Google and serves more than a billion views a day.  

(J. Hali Steele – With Extra Cream)

In my opinion, there are multiple ways for writers to market themselves on YouTube, but the most common method used by published authors are book trailers.  Similar to movie trailers, these visual blurbs as I call them satisfy the general publics’ love of visual images/interactive media over a stagnant banner ad.  Want to learn how to create a book trailer?  here’s a pretty good tutorial

(Psychic Hitch by Bekki Lynn)

If you’re thinking about creating a book trailer or have a few under your belt here’s a few SEO tips you can use to  improve your chances of people seeing it.  And everyone wants that since producing a book trailer takes time and patience. 

If you didn’t know already, YouTube has a SEO algorithm or ‘guidelines’ you should follow in order to optimize your video.  Here’s a simple breakdown:

TITLE =Make your title interesting.  Don’t just give the title of your book “Charmed” by Koko Brown Book Trailer.  How about “Why Vampires & Las Vegas Don’t Mix” or “Werewolves Look Hot in Leather.”

 DESCRIPTION=Tell users about the book, better yet use your blurb!  According to techies, 2 paragraphs of text heavily innundated with keywords should be used.   Think about it, the more words the more chances your video will be picked up in a YouTube search.  AND DON’T FORGET TO INCLUDE YOUR WEBSITE URL IN THE DESCRIPTION (preferably at the beginning before the user has to click ‘more info’) oh, yeah it wouldn’t hurt to have a CALL TO ACTION i.e., LIKE IT? BUY IT!

TAGS=The more tags you use the better.  They help search engines see you.  Great tags for “Why Vampires & Las Vegas Don’t Mix” would be “vampire”, “Las Vegas”, “erotica”, “eternal love”, “blood lust”, “romance novel”, “Koko Brown”,  just to name a few. 

 NUMBER OF VIEWS=Upload your YouTube video on as many sites as possible including your website, Yahoo Groups, a MySpace comment, Facebook news feed, etc.   Remember the link will always link back to YouTube and counts as a view in their stats.  This will help to keep you in their recent activity log and help you with ranking.  If you like using more sites other than YouTube, consider signing up for TubeMogul.  It’s a great application to upload a video to multiple sites. 

RATING=Don’t forget to rate your video and don’t be afraid to ask people to rate is as well.  The higher the rating the higher your ranking, the more chances your video will be seen…ka ching! 

(Buffy v. Edward…love this!)

Other than ‘manipulating’ YouTube’s alogorithm, here’s a few more tips you can use to improve your ROI (rate of investment) on this uber popular video sharing service: 

Produce your own YouTube channel.  Its the only way to obtain friends and subscribers who’ll sign up to be notified whenver you post;

Think of making your book trailer a “How- To- Video”.  For example, if you’ve written a paranomal and your hero is a werewolf.  How about telling the viewer how to date one? For example, “When going out for Italian hold the garlic”, “Conveniently disappear when there’s a full moon”, or “He’ll be putty in your hands if you scratch him behind your ears”.  If you do this, you can leave your blurb (which always closes the deal for me) for your description box;

Put your book trailers on your website.  Go even further by putting them on a separate page and use a description with your keywords.  Search engines eat up any and all kinds of content;

Don’t be shy, tell people about your video.  Post it on other websites/blogs also Yahoo Groups, FaceBook,  when you do an interviews or chat;  I would love to view a book trailer than read an excerpt anyday.  In fact, I found myself stuck in Romanticon’s Voyeurs Lounge and Romantic Times concierge TV station because of all the great trailers.

Create a spin-off a la Scary Movie.  Why not piggyback on the success of a blockbuster hit like “Zombieland” by using permissable clips like the creator of “Buffy vs. Edward video above. 

Well, I hope this helps!  Happy YouTubing everyone and stay tuned for “Make More than Just Friends on Facebook”