I wrote this post on another topic a couple weeks ago. Figure it may help you. These steps will definitely put you on the road to beating your competition:
Definitely make great use of YouTube's SEO search term abilities.
Step 1: Take the general keywords for your video niche that you would normally put as tags and BEGIN typing them into the search tool -- Don't type them all the way through
Step 2: Take a look at drop down box that appears when you haven't finished typing your keyword term as YouTube attempts to fill in your search term with the most common search phrases that come after the letter you typed
Step 3: Use those phrases and others to determine other potential searches YouTube users of this niche would like to see. Repeat the process with the dropdown as many times as you can.
Step 4: List of all these tags in the description
Step 5: Get more views and comments then other videos tagged with the same search terms so you appear in the #1 spot or at last on the first page.
It seems if you have more views, favorites, and comments then another video that over time YouTube will respond and bring you to the top.
Hope this helped! If anybody can add on to what I would say, I am always looking for new ways to improve my videos too! But this has worked pretty well for me
Also, if you are a partner, make sure you take advantage of uploading your thumbnail !