Search Engine Optimization doesn't just extend to your content on revenue sharing sites, your blogs, or your Wordpress sites. Anything and everything which relies on search engine traffic is competing on equal terms, and as such needs to be search engine optimized, your YouTube videos included. In order to be accepted into the YouTube Partnership Scheme you need to accrue a certain level of traffic, and in order to accrue that traffic you need to win traffic; a proportion of that traffic will come via the search engines. Once you are successfully accepted or invited into the YouTube Partnership Scheme your revenues are going to be dependant on that traffic, and again organic search engine traffic is going to play an important role. If your intention on YouTube is not to make a direct income, but instead promote a product or direct your viewers to a website, your financial success is still going to measured by thr level of success achieved through search engine optimization.
You should note that YouTube in itself is already the 2nd most used search engine in the world, so optimizing internally probably has more importance than optimizing externally; that said, Google likes pushing YouTube videos to the forefront of their search engine results, so external traffic is there to be won in significant quantities. YouTube and Google are of course the same business.
Keyword Research
Naturally, the most important part of your optimization will be the keyword research that you undertake. It is much easier to find a niche or micro-niche which has not been extensively covered on YouTube than it is to find a niche or micro-niche on Google. The hard part, and one which you must learn to master, is to find a niche or micro-niche which is undeveloped both on YouTube and the wider web. That is where the serious traffic will be won. Perhaps the most efficient way of doing this is to use your favourite keyword tool, preferably something like Market Samurai if you can afford it, to identify gaps in Google before taking your medium or long string terms to the YouTube search and seeing what it throws up.
Video Title
Obviously you are going to use your keyword string in the title, if it is a short or medium string phrase you may get away with discretely using it twice; for example I could identify Optimize YouTube Videos as a keyword phrase and then create the title: Optimize YouTube Videos: How To Optimize Your YouTube Videos. That sounds like a winner to me (no research undertaken).
Video Description
What you do here is highly dependant on what your objectives are, some may start with the URL of a website that they are plugging, I would personally utilise the first few lines of the description to offer a coherent but keyword laden description of the video, before introducing my website and the website URL afterwards. The description is the place to mention your keyword phrase again, but only once, utilise some relevant phrases but do watch your keyword density as we all know that keyword stuffing is detrimental rather than beneficial. I am not a natural at copywriting, but here is a quick attempt with some possible similar keyword phrases incorporated and the URL much less obtrusive:
Want to get more traffic to your videos but don't know how? It really isn't difficult to optimize YouTube Videos, in this video I offer 10 simple search engine optimization tips for YouTube users, for many more easy SEO tips visit my website http://www.example.com.
Tags
People so often underestimate the power of tags, those related videos to the right of any upload are powered almost entirely by titles and tags. I would suggest no more than 15 tags, probably as few as 8-10, but take your time when choosing them. What are competing videos using as tags? The type of videos which are relevant enough for you to want to sit next to in the related videos strip? Find five or six successful videos, and borrow two relevant tags from each.
Video Replies
You would have identified the most relevant successful videos from your analysis of competition, and to find tags to steal. Consider posting your video as a video reply to a few of these other videos, if the owners choose to allow replies that is. Don't go overboard and keep these replies highly relevant as the major benefit is allowing YouTube, and Google Search, to identify the relevance of your video to the wider topic. Posting a video reply to the latest 100 million view Justin Bieber video isn't going to help, and will instead probably hinder, a video which reviews the best inexpensive netbook. You should also allow others to add video replies to your own video, but reject or remove video replies which are not relevant to the subject matter.
Embedding
There is an growing tendancy for those who are members of the YouTube partnership scheme to disable embedding on their videos, for no apparent reason. In my opinion there is nothing to lose and plenty to gain by allowing others to embed your video into their websites and into their blog posts. Whilst it is true that most viewers will play the embeded video without clicking through to YouTube, some will. And that 'some' are almost always people that would otherwise have not have seen the video. Every viewer pushes up the videos view count, and videos with lots of views attract additional viewers (who want to see what the fuss is about), and ultimately a video embed is a free backlink. More often than not a that backlink is a DoFollow one; if you want search engines to view your video as one with importance and authority then that is precisely what you need.... DoFollow backlinks.
Build Links
And that brings me on to my final point, backlinks. Just like your written content, your videos benefit from backlinks. Asides from the usual SERPs beneficial DoFollow backlinks you will also find that YouTube videos can also win significant amounts of traffic from the mainstream NoFollow bookmarking sites such as Digg.
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