9 Simple Steps to get Your Youtube Videos Ranking
1. Create awesome videos which are shareable
2. Use attractive and relevant titles and thumbnails. Also, make sure your titles have the important keywords. Before uploading your videos, rename them with a temporary but relevant title which best describes your video, as it includes keywords too.
3. Describe your video. First two lines should contain a short teasing summary of your video. Rest of the body can contain other fine details and your social media and website URLs. You can also add playlist and subscribe links to make users watching more from you.
4. Keywords: Search for the keywords that best describe your content and are also searchable.
NOTE: Searching for best keywords can be a difficult and tiring task but its also an art. You can take help from online tools too. (Let me know in case you need a reliable tool)
5. Create Playlists and write a meaningful description for it which includes best keywords too.
6. Annotations & Cards: Check the Audience Retention graph on YouTube analytics to find where users are closing or leaving your video. Insert annotation before that time. Cards appear on mobile devices too. Place an annotation of your latest video on your most popular videos to give it an extra exposure.
7. CC (Closed Captions) or Subtitles: Write subtitles or closed captions for your videos. This not only increases your viewing audience, it also completes one of the search preference parameters and also the words in the transcript act as additional keywords.
8. Sharing: If your video is shareable, just share it with everyone and everywhere. Facebook, Twitter, Google+, emails, WhatsApp, messages, Blogs, etc. Join communities and create posts. If your viewers like it, they will share it with everyone else too.
9. Call-to-action: It is really important that you tell your viewers to share the video with their friends. They will do it automatically if they like it, but most of the times they don't do it till you don't ask for it. So, ask them (towards the end of your video)! If you don't have an anchor or a presenter in the video, use text and graphics to pass on the message. You can also use annotations for this.
