How to Optimize Your YouTube Channel and Videos

When you optimize your YouTube channel and the videos that you upload to the platform, you will not only provide an optimal viewing experience for all your followers, but your visibility on the platform will also be boosted. Understanding how the YouTube algorithm works can make it much easier for you to optimize your videos and your channel so that a great many more viewers have a chance to enjoy your videos. The discussion below will provide some tips on the best way to set up your YouTube channel, as well as how to optimize your videos for maximum exposure on the platform.

Design a great Home Page Since it's the first thing viewers will see, your YouTube channel home page should make a good impression and should attempt to draw viewers in to take a second look. That means you should do whatever it takes to develop a professional-looking home page which conveys everything your channel is all about. The first thing you should do is choose a good profile picture, since this is basically serving as an icon for your channel, and it will show up anywhere that you make a comment on YouTube.Since this is such a powerful ad for your business, you should try to find a very clear, identifiable image which has very little clutter. The best kind of picture to choose is the image of a face because they're much easier to pick out by viewers then logos are, and since your profile picture already looks so small on the screen, clarity is of the utmost importance.When you're adding or changing a profile pic, it can be a little awkward, since it's connected to your Google account. When you click on the button to edit your profile picture, you will be navigated over to your Google profile, and that's where you can upload the new picture you have in mind.

Upload some channel art

You'll find the header image at the top of your channel home page, and this is where you should add your channel schedule to the artwork, as well as any personalities you wish to add. The first time you upload any channel art, you'll have to go to your YouTube channel page by clicking on your profile photo on your homepage, then select My Channel, and then you'll have to click on Customized Channel.At this point, you will be able to click on Add Channel Part, by dragging and dropping files, or by navigating to the desired image which you intend to upload. When you're ready to change your current channel art, all you have to do is hover over the header image, click on the pencil icon at the upper right, and then upload whatever new image you have. Before going live with it, you should test the new image on TV and on mobile devices.

Create a channel trailer

Your channel trailer is what plays automatically whenever a visitor comes to your channel, and it could represent your best chance for gaining a new subscriber. You should create a video which is one or two minutes long, and which informs viewerswhat your channel is all about. If you can make this two-minute video fun and engaging while also being informative, you have a much better chance of gaining new subscribers.After you've created your channel trailer, you should go ahead and create some playlists as well. These should feature your best work, with playlists appearing in different sections of your homepage, up to a maximum of 10 sections. Ideally, your playlists should feature popular topics on your channel, and they will promote the possibility of encouraging viewers to binge-watch content from your channel. If you can keep your content engaging and your playlists interesting, you can have viewers attached to your channel for quite a while.

Research useful keywords

After Google, YouTube is the second most popular search engine in global usage, and for anyone who was unaware, YouTube is actually owned by Google. That's why it's no coincidence that searching is not just a featured benefit on YouTube, but it's also one of the most opportune ways of expanding your channel, particularly for those who are just becoming active on YouTube.When you're just starting out on YouTube, your best bet for acquiring new viewers is through optimizing for search. Later on when you become an experienced YouTube user and you have a sizable audience, you'll come to learn some of the dozens of metrics used in the YouTube algorithm, but in the beginning, all you really need to know is search optimization.For this, you need to optimize your keywords and tags to boost rankings for your playlists, your videos, and actually for the entire channel. This will provide you with extra search results, increased viewing suggestions, and lots more subscriber conversions over a period of time. Your best-performing keywords should serve not only as tags on your channel and on your video content, but they should also be used in your video titles.If you're not certain about which keywords to use, you can get help on researching them from suggestions offered by Google search and by YouTube. The easiest way to do this is to type in a keyword relating to your channel in the Google search bar or the YouTube search bar and then watch for the keywords which populate the drop-down results box.

Develop and organize channel by using your playlist

Playlists are frequently used on YouTube by creators and brands simply as an organizational tool, and these are often placed on the channel home page for the purpose of categorizing videos that new viewers will have the capability of browsing. While this is good practice by itself, playlists are capable of accomplishing much more for you, when used correctly.You can actually treat your YouTube channel like a TV network, and you can use your playlist to develop a content strategy which guides your users along through consecutive videos for hours of viewing time, rather than for just a few minutes. Thereis also a very good SEO function served by playlists since they connect videos with similar keywords and tags to playlists with those same keywords and tags. Using playlists also gets you in the habit of thinking bigger than creating individual videos, and that's what leads to the development of a cohesive and well-organized YouTube channel.