What is SEO?

SEO has been around for decades. Shortly after the advent of the very first website in 1991, SEO officially began to take shape around 1997. 

SEO is defined as the practice of increasing the quantity or quality of traffic to a website through organic search engine results. 

Traditional SEO

What goes into traditional SEO is both very common and extremely complex. The former could come in the form of things you do every day as a marketer or small business owner; creating a URL, writing a title, penning a meta description for a blog, or adding captions to a set of photos. SEO is the practice of optimizing those tasks (and more) to help Google recognize those pages and rank them through its search engine. 

Of course, much of what happens with traditional SEO revolves around the Google algorithm and its ever-changing nature. The very best SEO practitioners keep pace with the algorithm and shift their strategy based on those changes.

Youtube SEO

The biggest difference between Youtube SEO and traditional SEO is that they adhere to entirely different search engines. Simply put, you will not rank videos on Youtube the same way you would rank pages on Google. 

Youtube describes its algorithm and discovery process very simply:

“Videos are ranked based on a variety of factors including how well the title, description, and video content match the viewer’s query. Beyond that, we look at which videos have driven the most engagement for a query, and make sure it’s easy for viewers to find those.”

While these ranking factors are very similar to traditional SEO, they are examined very differently. Those subtle distinctions can be the difference between ranking your videos on Youtube and just simply posting a video that garners little traffic. Like most things, the difference between success and trial & error is in the details. 

Now that you know what SEO is and the difference between Youtube and traditional SEO, let’s jump into some best practices.