Maximizing Video Visibility on YouTube with SEO Insights

YouTube SEO Guide: How to Improve Search Rankings For Your YouTube Videos

Richard Bennett

Mar 27, 2024• Proven solutions

If there exists searches, there exists SEO. YouTube now is the second largest search engine which processes more than 3 billion searches in a single month. Besides making sure that each video you upload to YouTube offers thought-provoking content, you can also optimize the video in accordance with the rules of SEO to stand out from the 500 hours of videos uploaded per minutes.

If you are trying to learn more about the SEO optimization of YouTube videos, you’ve landed on the right page, because in this guide we are going to take you through the process of improving the search rankings for each video you upload to YouTube.

YouTube SEO Guide

Quick Jump Menu:

The guide covers these five aspects of YouTube SEO optimization:

• The Basics - Five Main Traffic Sources
• How to Come Up With SEO Topics?
• The Metadata Process
• Promoting Videos Using Off-Channel Marketing
• How to Monitor a Video’s Data?

The Basics - Five Main Traffic Sources

Producing a video and posting it on your YouTube channel is simply not enough to guarantee its success. You have to know where the video’s traffic will come from, because over 500 hours of video content are being uploaded each minute, and there are over 50 million content creators on the platform.

That’s the reason why you have to develop a strategy that will attract the traffic to your videos and place them high in the YouTube’s search rankings. Let’s have a look at five traffic sources that will boost the number of views and comments videos are getting.

YouTube Search

A great deal of traffic for your videos can come from the search results, which makes the title of a video one of the most important aspects of SEO optimization on YouTube.

Don’t use long titles, strive to use short and catchy titles that also contain keywords which accurately describe the contents of the video in order to appear higher in the YouTube’s search results.

Suggested Videos

The platform offers video suggestions that cover topics similar to those of the videos you already watched. Once more, the title and the description you provided will play a crucial role in driving more traffic to your videos, so make sure that each video you post on YouTube has an effective title that will spark interest in a potential viewer to take action and actually watch the video.

Suggested videos that appear next to the video

Suggested videos that appear after the video

Suggested videos that appear from links in a video description.

YouTube Advertising

Investing in the promotion of the content you’re posting on your channel can help you to generate more views, but different types of YouTube ads produce different results. Non-skippable ads never count as a view, while a skippable ad that lasts more than ten seconds must be viewed for at least thirty seconds in order to qualify as a view. All other types of YouTube ads require the viewer to click on them and play them so the YouTube Analytics can recognize the action as a view.

Channel Pages, Browse Features, Playlists

Channel Pages - This method of generating traffic includes views created by other channel owners as well as Topic Channels that are automatically created using the platform’s video discovery system. In either case, your videos are discovered through search results or video suggestions.

Browse Features - The homepage of your YouTube channel as well as the subscription feed and all other browse features can be a potential source of views for your videos. The YouTube users who watch a video on your channel can be either signed-in or signed-out, but the YouTube Analytics tool will still recognize their action as a view.

Playlists - Producing content other YouTubers will want to include in their playlists is one of the best ways to attract more traffic and increase the amount of views videos you upload to your YouTube channel are getting.

External Traffic Sources

Even though YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, sharing a link to a video on social media such as Twitter or Facebook or embedding it on your website can significantly increase the number of views the video is getting.

Sources of traffic mentioned above are not equally effective, because the intent to actually watch the video varies greatly for each source. That’s why you’ll be able to achieve the best results if you combine several, if not all sources of traffic described in this guide.

How to Come Up With SEO Topics

Videos are a form of communication, and like with all forms of communication, you must know who you are addressing in order to know what to say. Defining the target audience before you start creating a video will make the SEO optimization process much simpler and much faster.

Let’s say that you want to become a successful beauty vlogger and your aim is to produce makeup tutorials. Your first step should be to determine which market is the most relevant for you. Assuming you’d like to target the Asian market, it becomes obvious that the audience you’ll be addressing will consist of women in need of practical makeup advice and your colleagues who offer similar types of tutorials.

Now that you’ve defined your target audience you can proceed to develop the content strategy. People search videos for many different reasons, but their motivation can be approximately divided into four micro-moments. These are:

I want to know, I want to go, I want to do and I want to buy moments and some or all can be applied to all types of YouTube videos.

I want to know moments refer to YouTube users who want to learn more about a certain topic and often ask how to perform a certain action. In the beauty niche, the search terms may include questions like ‘Is makeup bad for your skin?’ or ‘What is contouring?’.

I want to do moments reflect a certain need the potential viewer of your videos has, and your video should provide a straightforward answer. Most common I want to do search patterns for beauty vloggers are ‘How to apply mascara, eyeliner, etc..’

If you know quite a bit about beauty products, then producing videos that rely on I want to buy moments is a sure way to attract a lot of traffic to your videos. These include product reviews, top ten videos or comparison videos that offer the reasons for and against buying a certain product.

Furthermore, you should try to think of a way to create a makeup video that makes the viewer feel involved, so even if you are just explaining the basic terms or tools in the video, viewers should have the feeling that they are learning something.

After defining your target audience and determining what you have to offer, you can choose the topic based on keywords. Here’s how you can easily come up with keyword ideas for your YouTube videos.

How to find the right keywords ideas?

YouTube Search Suggestions:

This is by far the easiest and fastest way to come up with an SEO friendly topic for a video. The best part is that the keywords you come up with will work without a doubt since all suggestions are based on search terms actual people have already used.

Copy the Keywords From a Video in Your Niche that Already Has a Lot of Views:

Study the competition and find a few channels with hundreds of thousands of subscribers that cover the same topics as you. These channels probably have a significant number of videos so just sort them out using the ‘Most Popular’ option.

Click on a video that has the most views and that also has a topic that isn’t far removed from what you want to do. When the video is open, look for the keyword around which it is centered, in the title, description or tags and just find a creative way to incorporate it into your video.

Use YouTube’s Traffic Sources and Search Report:

If you would like to find out which keywords YouTubers have used to find your videos this is your best option. Even though the chances are you’ll know most keywords in the report since you already used them for SEO optimization of your videos, you might come up with a few unexpected entries that might be useful.

Look for low-competition keywords, because frequently used keywords are already used by videos featured on channels that have a lot of followers. Low-competition keywords can be particularly helpful if you are trying to grow your channel since they might attract more viewers than the most obvious keyword choices.

YouTube keyword tools:

https://filmora.wondershare.com/vlogger/youtube-keyword-tools.html

The Metadata Process

Now that you’ve found the best keywords for a video you’d like to upload to your YouTube channel, you should do everything in your power to maximize its SEO value. The following YouTube Ranking factors all play a part in the success your video will enjoy:

• On Video (Metadata)
• Recommendations
• Channel
• User Action

As you can see, metadata is directly related to the search rankings performance of your videos. So what is metadata exactly?

Video file name: The SEO optimization of a YouTube video starts even before you upload the file to your channel. When naming a video file, make sure that the name contains a keyword, because the platform’s algorithm will analyze it and use it to determine how high it should be ranked in the search results.

Video title: The title of a YouTube video is added after the upload is complete. So, in order to increase the video’s chances of appearing high in the search results, you should place the keyword at its begging and avoid using titles longer than 70 characters as much as you can.

Description: The more words you use to describe a video, the better. YouTube descriptions can have up to 5000 characters, which gives you quite a lot of room to use the keywords you’ve selected.

Tags: You can hardly use too many tags, as a matter of fact, you should use as many tags as you can think of. Channel name, brand name, related keywords are all great choices for tags, just keep in mind that they can’t be longer than 127 characters.

YouTube tag generator:

http://www.betterwaytoweb.com/tag-generator-for-youtube

Transcript: Chances are that the keyword around which your video is based appears quite a lot in the narration and dialogue. YouTube lets you create transcripts of all your videos in just a few simple clicks, which enables you to take the SEO optimization a step further.

Promoting Videos Using Off-Channel Marketing

One of the greatest advantages YouTube offers is how easy it is to share the links to your videos on social media or anywhere else on the Internet. These off-channel marketing methods can help you drive more traffic to the videos you upload to YouTube:

Embedding the Link: Articles covering topics similar to the topic your video is covering are a perfect place to embed a link to the video featured on your channel. What’s more, you can embed a link in your blog posts, on your website, or on a website of a partner company.

Backlinks: A backlink is a link from some other website to the particular web resource, in this case, your video. You can insert links that offer additional information about the topic and by doing so increase the traffic.

Third-party Website Promotion: Share links to videos you upload to YouTube on websites like Quora or forums such as Filmora.io.

Team up with Other YouTube Creators: Looking for cooperation on Fiverr, or just send them private messages to ask for recommendation/follow. Add your video in their playlist, or in Related Channel, End-screen card, etc.

How to Monitor a Video’s Data?

YouTube Analytics is a tool that will enable you to find out more about the people who are watching your videos. How many of your subscribers have watched a video you added to your channel? How many viewers found a video you uploaded through search results? The answer to these questions can be easily found with this tool.

YouTube Analytics also provides insight into subscriber conversion rates, so you can know exactly which videos attracted the most subscribers. This feature is particularly important if you are still developing your channel since it can help you understand which type of videos inspired a viewer to take action and hit the Subscribe button

Combining the information supplied by the YouTube Analytics with the data Google Analytics can offer will allow you to get to know the viewers of your videos better, which can be useful when planning the topics of the videos you’d like to upload to your YouTube channel in the future. If you’d like to gain access to more advanced statistics, there are a lot of free and paid YouTube analytics tools that enable you to keep track of the number of video comments, rankings, dislikes, likes, video replies or favorites.

Each of these metrics serves as a building block of a successful YouTube channel because uploading a video during a weekend or during the working days may not produce the same results. The YouTube analytics tools can assist you in staying one step ahead of your competition and increasing the number of subscribers to your YouTube channel.

A Few Final Thoughts

Just keep these fundamental things into your mind when you’re doing YouTube SEO:

YouTube will do anything they can to keep viewer watch longer

So what’s relevant to the content? YouTube

Always suggest videos from the same creator (so you should use brand, channel name tags)

Evaluated what people watch next and which video they ignore.

Displays video with the similar titles and keywords/tags

So what’s relevant to the viewers? YouTube

Learns your preferences, style, tasted

Considers what content might be interesting to an individual viewer: analyze viewing history, channel subscriptions, search history, viewing choices.

Richard Bennett

Richard Bennett is a writer and a lover of all things video.

Follow @Richard Bennett

Richard Bennett

Mar 27, 2024• Proven solutions

If there exists searches, there exists SEO. YouTube now is the second largest search engine which processes more than 3 billion searches in a single month. Besides making sure that each video you upload to YouTube offers thought-provoking content, you can also optimize the video in accordance with the rules of SEO to stand out from the 500 hours of videos uploaded per minutes.

If you are trying to learn more about the SEO optimization of YouTube videos, you’ve landed on the right page, because in this guide we are going to take you through the process of improving the search rankings for each video you upload to YouTube.

YouTube SEO Guide

Quick Jump Menu:

The guide covers these five aspects of YouTube SEO optimization:

• The Basics - Five Main Traffic Sources
• How to Come Up With SEO Topics?
• The Metadata Process
• Promoting Videos Using Off-Channel Marketing
• How to Monitor a Video’s Data?

The Basics - Five Main Traffic Sources

Producing a video and posting it on your YouTube channel is simply not enough to guarantee its success. You have to know where the video’s traffic will come from, because over 500 hours of video content are being uploaded each minute, and there are over 50 million content creators on the platform.

That’s the reason why you have to develop a strategy that will attract the traffic to your videos and place them high in the YouTube’s search rankings. Let’s have a look at five traffic sources that will boost the number of views and comments videos are getting.

YouTube Search

A great deal of traffic for your videos can come from the search results, which makes the title of a video one of the most important aspects of SEO optimization on YouTube.

Don’t use long titles, strive to use short and catchy titles that also contain keywords which accurately describe the contents of the video in order to appear higher in the YouTube’s search results.

Suggested Videos

The platform offers video suggestions that cover topics similar to those of the videos you already watched. Once more, the title and the description you provided will play a crucial role in driving more traffic to your videos, so make sure that each video you post on YouTube has an effective title that will spark interest in a potential viewer to take action and actually watch the video.

Suggested videos that appear next to the video

Suggested videos that appear after the video

Suggested videos that appear from links in a video description.

YouTube Advertising

Investing in the promotion of the content you’re posting on your channel can help you to generate more views, but different types of YouTube ads produce different results. Non-skippable ads never count as a view, while a skippable ad that lasts more than ten seconds must be viewed for at least thirty seconds in order to qualify as a view. All other types of YouTube ads require the viewer to click on them and play them so the YouTube Analytics can recognize the action as a view.

Channel Pages, Browse Features, Playlists

Channel Pages - This method of generating traffic includes views created by other channel owners as well as Topic Channels that are automatically created using the platform’s video discovery system. In either case, your videos are discovered through search results or video suggestions.

Browse Features - The homepage of your YouTube channel as well as the subscription feed and all other browse features can be a potential source of views for your videos. The YouTube users who watch a video on your channel can be either signed-in or signed-out, but the YouTube Analytics tool will still recognize their action as a view.

Playlists - Producing content other YouTubers will want to include in their playlists is one of the best ways to attract more traffic and increase the amount of views videos you upload to your YouTube channel are getting.

External Traffic Sources

Even though YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, sharing a link to a video on social media such as Twitter or Facebook or embedding it on your website can significantly increase the number of views the video is getting.

Sources of traffic mentioned above are not equally effective, because the intent to actually watch the video varies greatly for each source. That’s why you’ll be able to achieve the best results if you combine several, if not all sources of traffic described in this guide.

How to Come Up With SEO Topics

Videos are a form of communication, and like with all forms of communication, you must know who you are addressing in order to know what to say. Defining the target audience before you start creating a video will make the SEO optimization process much simpler and much faster.

Let’s say that you want to become a successful beauty vlogger and your aim is to produce makeup tutorials. Your first step should be to determine which market is the most relevant for you. Assuming you’d like to target the Asian market, it becomes obvious that the audience you’ll be addressing will consist of women in need of practical makeup advice and your colleagues who offer similar types of tutorials.

Now that you’ve defined your target audience you can proceed to develop the content strategy. People search videos for many different reasons, but their motivation can be approximately divided into four micro-moments. These are:

I want to know, I want to go, I want to do and I want to buy moments and some or all can be applied to all types of YouTube videos.

I want to know moments refer to YouTube users who want to learn more about a certain topic and often ask how to perform a certain action. In the beauty niche, the search terms may include questions like ‘Is makeup bad for your skin?’ or ‘What is contouring?’.

I want to do moments reflect a certain need the potential viewer of your videos has, and your video should provide a straightforward answer. Most common I want to do search patterns for beauty vloggers are ‘How to apply mascara, eyeliner, etc..’

If you know quite a bit about beauty products, then producing videos that rely on I want to buy moments is a sure way to attract a lot of traffic to your videos. These include product reviews, top ten videos or comparison videos that offer the reasons for and against buying a certain product.

Furthermore, you should try to think of a way to create a makeup video that makes the viewer feel involved, so even if you are just explaining the basic terms or tools in the video, viewers should have the feeling that they are learning something.

After defining your target audience and determining what you have to offer, you can choose the topic based on keywords. Here’s how you can easily come up with keyword ideas for your YouTube videos.

How to find the right keywords ideas?

YouTube Search Suggestions:

This is by far the easiest and fastest way to come up with an SEO friendly topic for a video. The best part is that the keywords you come up with will work without a doubt since all suggestions are based on search terms actual people have already used.

Copy the Keywords From a Video in Your Niche that Already Has a Lot of Views:

Study the competition and find a few channels with hundreds of thousands of subscribers that cover the same topics as you. These channels probably have a significant number of videos so just sort them out using the ‘Most Popular’ option.

Click on a video that has the most views and that also has a topic that isn’t far removed from what you want to do. When the video is open, look for the keyword around which it is centered, in the title, description or tags and just find a creative way to incorporate it into your video.

Use YouTube’s Traffic Sources and Search Report:

If you would like to find out which keywords YouTubers have used to find your videos this is your best option. Even though the chances are you’ll know most keywords in the report since you already used them for SEO optimization of your videos, you might come up with a few unexpected entries that might be useful.

Look for low-competition keywords, because frequently used keywords are already used by videos featured on channels that have a lot of followers. Low-competition keywords can be particularly helpful if you are trying to grow your channel since they might attract more viewers than the most obvious keyword choices.

YouTube keyword tools:

https://filmora.wondershare.com/vlogger/youtube-keyword-tools.html

The Metadata Process

Now that you’ve found the best keywords for a video you’d like to upload to your YouTube channel, you should do everything in your power to maximize its SEO value. The following YouTube Ranking factors all play a part in the success your video will enjoy:

• On Video (Metadata)
• Recommendations
• Channel
• User Action

As you can see, metadata is directly related to the search rankings performance of your videos. So what is metadata exactly?

Video file name: The SEO optimization of a YouTube video starts even before you upload the file to your channel. When naming a video file, make sure that the name contains a keyword, because the platform’s algorithm will analyze it and use it to determine how high it should be ranked in the search results.

Video title: The title of a YouTube video is added after the upload is complete. So, in order to increase the video’s chances of appearing high in the search results, you should place the keyword at its begging and avoid using titles longer than 70 characters as much as you can.

Description: The more words you use to describe a video, the better. YouTube descriptions can have up to 5000 characters, which gives you quite a lot of room to use the keywords you’ve selected.

Tags: You can hardly use too many tags, as a matter of fact, you should use as many tags as you can think of. Channel name, brand name, related keywords are all great choices for tags, just keep in mind that they can’t be longer than 127 characters.

YouTube tag generator:

http://www.betterwaytoweb.com/tag-generator-for-youtube

Transcript: Chances are that the keyword around which your video is based appears quite a lot in the narration and dialogue. YouTube lets you create transcripts of all your videos in just a few simple clicks, which enables you to take the SEO optimization a step further.

Promoting Videos Using Off-Channel Marketing

One of the greatest advantages YouTube offers is how easy it is to share the links to your videos on social media or anywhere else on the Internet. These off-channel marketing methods can help you drive more traffic to the videos you upload to YouTube:

Embedding the Link: Articles covering topics similar to the topic your video is covering are a perfect place to embed a link to the video featured on your channel. What’s more, you can embed a link in your blog posts, on your website, or on a website of a partner company.

Backlinks: A backlink is a link from some other website to the particular web resource, in this case, your video. You can insert links that offer additional information about the topic and by doing so increase the traffic.

Third-party Website Promotion: Share links to videos you upload to YouTube on websites like Quora or forums such as Filmora.io.

Team up with Other YouTube Creators: Looking for cooperation on Fiverr, or just send them private messages to ask for recommendation/follow. Add your video in their playlist, or in Related Channel, End-screen card, etc.

How to Monitor a Video’s Data?

YouTube Analytics is a tool that will enable you to find out more about the people who are watching your videos. How many of your subscribers have watched a video you added to your channel? How many viewers found a video you uploaded through search results? The answer to these questions can be easily found with this tool.

YouTube Analytics also provides insight into subscriber conversion rates, so you can know exactly which videos attracted the most subscribers. This feature is particularly important if you are still developing your channel since it can help you understand which type of videos inspired a viewer to take action and hit the Subscribe button

Combining the information supplied by the YouTube Analytics with the data Google Analytics can offer will allow you to get to know the viewers of your videos better, which can be useful when planning the topics of the videos you’d like to upload to your YouTube channel in the future. If you’d like to gain access to more advanced statistics, there are a lot of free and paid YouTube analytics tools that enable you to keep track of the number of video comments, rankings, dislikes, likes, video replies or favorites.

Each of these metrics serves as a building block of a successful YouTube channel because uploading a video during a weekend or during the working days may not produce the same results. The YouTube analytics tools can assist you in staying one step ahead of your competition and increasing the number of subscribers to your YouTube channel.

A Few Final Thoughts

Just keep these fundamental things into your mind when you’re doing YouTube SEO:

YouTube will do anything they can to keep viewer watch longer

So what’s relevant to the content? YouTube

Always suggest videos from the same creator (so you should use brand, channel name tags)

Evaluated what people watch next and which video they ignore.

Displays video with the similar titles and keywords/tags

So what’s relevant to the viewers? YouTube

Learns your preferences, style, tasted

Considers what content might be interesting to an individual viewer: analyze viewing history, channel subscriptions, search history, viewing choices.

Richard Bennett

Richard Bennett is a writer and a lover of all things video.

Follow @Richard Bennett

Richard Bennett

Mar 27, 2024• Proven solutions

If there exists searches, there exists SEO. YouTube now is the second largest search engine which processes more than 3 billion searches in a single month. Besides making sure that each video you upload to YouTube offers thought-provoking content, you can also optimize the video in accordance with the rules of SEO to stand out from the 500 hours of videos uploaded per minutes.

If you are trying to learn more about the SEO optimization of YouTube videos, you’ve landed on the right page, because in this guide we are going to take you through the process of improving the search rankings for each video you upload to YouTube.

YouTube SEO Guide

Quick Jump Menu:

The guide covers these five aspects of YouTube SEO optimization:

• The Basics - Five Main Traffic Sources
• How to Come Up With SEO Topics?
• The Metadata Process
• Promoting Videos Using Off-Channel Marketing
• How to Monitor a Video’s Data?

The Basics - Five Main Traffic Sources

Producing a video and posting it on your YouTube channel is simply not enough to guarantee its success. You have to know where the video’s traffic will come from, because over 500 hours of video content are being uploaded each minute, and there are over 50 million content creators on the platform.

That’s the reason why you have to develop a strategy that will attract the traffic to your videos and place them high in the YouTube’s search rankings. Let’s have a look at five traffic sources that will boost the number of views and comments videos are getting.

YouTube Search

A great deal of traffic for your videos can come from the search results, which makes the title of a video one of the most important aspects of SEO optimization on YouTube.

Don’t use long titles, strive to use short and catchy titles that also contain keywords which accurately describe the contents of the video in order to appear higher in the YouTube’s search results.

Suggested Videos

The platform offers video suggestions that cover topics similar to those of the videos you already watched. Once more, the title and the description you provided will play a crucial role in driving more traffic to your videos, so make sure that each video you post on YouTube has an effective title that will spark interest in a potential viewer to take action and actually watch the video.

Suggested videos that appear next to the video

Suggested videos that appear after the video

Suggested videos that appear from links in a video description.

YouTube Advertising

Investing in the promotion of the content you’re posting on your channel can help you to generate more views, but different types of YouTube ads produce different results. Non-skippable ads never count as a view, while a skippable ad that lasts more than ten seconds must be viewed for at least thirty seconds in order to qualify as a view. All other types of YouTube ads require the viewer to click on them and play them so the YouTube Analytics can recognize the action as a view.

Channel Pages, Browse Features, Playlists

Channel Pages - This method of generating traffic includes views created by other channel owners as well as Topic Channels that are automatically created using the platform’s video discovery system. In either case, your videos are discovered through search results or video suggestions.

Browse Features - The homepage of your YouTube channel as well as the subscription feed and all other browse features can be a potential source of views for your videos. The YouTube users who watch a video on your channel can be either signed-in or signed-out, but the YouTube Analytics tool will still recognize their action as a view.

Playlists - Producing content other YouTubers will want to include in their playlists is one of the best ways to attract more traffic and increase the amount of views videos you upload to your YouTube channel are getting.

External Traffic Sources

Even though YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, sharing a link to a video on social media such as Twitter or Facebook or embedding it on your website can significantly increase the number of views the video is getting.

Sources of traffic mentioned above are not equally effective, because the intent to actually watch the video varies greatly for each source. That’s why you’ll be able to achieve the best results if you combine several, if not all sources of traffic described in this guide.

How to Come Up With SEO Topics

Videos are a form of communication, and like with all forms of communication, you must know who you are addressing in order to know what to say. Defining the target audience before you start creating a video will make the SEO optimization process much simpler and much faster.

Let’s say that you want to become a successful beauty vlogger and your aim is to produce makeup tutorials. Your first step should be to determine which market is the most relevant for you. Assuming you’d like to target the Asian market, it becomes obvious that the audience you’ll be addressing will consist of women in need of practical makeup advice and your colleagues who offer similar types of tutorials.

Now that you’ve defined your target audience you can proceed to develop the content strategy. People search videos for many different reasons, but their motivation can be approximately divided into four micro-moments. These are:

I want to know, I want to go, I want to do and I want to buy moments and some or all can be applied to all types of YouTube videos.

I want to know moments refer to YouTube users who want to learn more about a certain topic and often ask how to perform a certain action. In the beauty niche, the search terms may include questions like ‘Is makeup bad for your skin?’ or ‘What is contouring?’.

I want to do moments reflect a certain need the potential viewer of your videos has, and your video should provide a straightforward answer. Most common I want to do search patterns for beauty vloggers are ‘How to apply mascara, eyeliner, etc..’

If you know quite a bit about beauty products, then producing videos that rely on I want to buy moments is a sure way to attract a lot of traffic to your videos. These include product reviews, top ten videos or comparison videos that offer the reasons for and against buying a certain product.

Furthermore, you should try to think of a way to create a makeup video that makes the viewer feel involved, so even if you are just explaining the basic terms or tools in the video, viewers should have the feeling that they are learning something.

After defining your target audience and determining what you have to offer, you can choose the topic based on keywords. Here’s how you can easily come up with keyword ideas for your YouTube videos.

How to find the right keywords ideas?

YouTube Search Suggestions:

This is by far the easiest and fastest way to come up with an SEO friendly topic for a video. The best part is that the keywords you come up with will work without a doubt since all suggestions are based on search terms actual people have already used.

Copy the Keywords From a Video in Your Niche that Already Has a Lot of Views:

Study the competition and find a few channels with hundreds of thousands of subscribers that cover the same topics as you. These channels probably have a significant number of videos so just sort them out using the ‘Most Popular’ option.

Click on a video that has the most views and that also has a topic that isn’t far removed from what you want to do. When the video is open, look for the keyword around which it is centered, in the title, description or tags and just find a creative way to incorporate it into your video.

Use YouTube’s Traffic Sources and Search Report:

If you would like to find out which keywords YouTubers have used to find your videos this is your best option. Even though the chances are you’ll know most keywords in the report since you already used them for SEO optimization of your videos, you might come up with a few unexpected entries that might be useful.

Look for low-competition keywords, because frequently used keywords are already used by videos featured on channels that have a lot of followers. Low-competition keywords can be particularly helpful if you are trying to grow your channel since they might attract more viewers than the most obvious keyword choices.

YouTube keyword tools:

https://filmora.wondershare.com/vlogger/youtube-keyword-tools.html

The Metadata Process

Now that you’ve found the best keywords for a video you’d like to upload to your YouTube channel, you should do everything in your power to maximize its SEO value. The following YouTube Ranking factors all play a part in the success your video will enjoy:

• On Video (Metadata)
• Recommendations
• Channel
• User Action

As you can see, metadata is directly related to the search rankings performance of your videos. So what is metadata exactly?

Video file name: The SEO optimization of a YouTube video starts even before you upload the file to your channel. When naming a video file, make sure that the name contains a keyword, because the platform’s algorithm will analyze it and use it to determine how high it should be ranked in the search results.

Video title: The title of a YouTube video is added after the upload is complete. So, in order to increase the video’s chances of appearing high in the search results, you should place the keyword at its begging and avoid using titles longer than 70 characters as much as you can.

Description: The more words you use to describe a video, the better. YouTube descriptions can have up to 5000 characters, which gives you quite a lot of room to use the keywords you’ve selected.

Tags: You can hardly use too many tags, as a matter of fact, you should use as many tags as you can think of. Channel name, brand name, related keywords are all great choices for tags, just keep in mind that they can’t be longer than 127 characters.

YouTube tag generator:

http://www.betterwaytoweb.com/tag-generator-for-youtube

Transcript: Chances are that the keyword around which your video is based appears quite a lot in the narration and dialogue. YouTube lets you create transcripts of all your videos in just a few simple clicks, which enables you to take the SEO optimization a step further.

Promoting Videos Using Off-Channel Marketing

One of the greatest advantages YouTube offers is how easy it is to share the links to your videos on social media or anywhere else on the Internet. These off-channel marketing methods can help you drive more traffic to the videos you upload to YouTube:

Embedding the Link: Articles covering topics similar to the topic your video is covering are a perfect place to embed a link to the video featured on your channel. What’s more, you can embed a link in your blog posts, on your website, or on a website of a partner company.

Backlinks: A backlink is a link from some other website to the particular web resource, in this case, your video. You can insert links that offer additional information about the topic and by doing so increase the traffic.

Third-party Website Promotion: Share links to videos you upload to YouTube on websites like Quora or forums such as Filmora.io.

Team up with Other YouTube Creators: Looking for cooperation on Fiverr, or just send them private messages to ask for recommendation/follow. Add your video in their playlist, or in Related Channel, End-screen card, etc.

How to Monitor a Video’s Data?

YouTube Analytics is a tool that will enable you to find out more about the people who are watching your videos. How many of your subscribers have watched a video you added to your channel? How many viewers found a video you uploaded through search results? The answer to these questions can be easily found with this tool.

YouTube Analytics also provides insight into subscriber conversion rates, so you can know exactly which videos attracted the most subscribers. This feature is particularly important if you are still developing your channel since it can help you understand which type of videos inspired a viewer to take action and hit the Subscribe button

Combining the information supplied by the YouTube Analytics with the data Google Analytics can offer will allow you to get to know the viewers of your videos better, which can be useful when planning the topics of the videos you’d like to upload to your YouTube channel in the future. If you’d like to gain access to more advanced statistics, there are a lot of free and paid YouTube analytics tools that enable you to keep track of the number of video comments, rankings, dislikes, likes, video replies or favorites.

Each of these metrics serves as a building block of a successful YouTube channel because uploading a video during a weekend or during the working days may not produce the same results. The YouTube analytics tools can assist you in staying one step ahead of your competition and increasing the number of subscribers to your YouTube channel.

A Few Final Thoughts

Just keep these fundamental things into your mind when you’re doing YouTube SEO:

YouTube will do anything they can to keep viewer watch longer

So what’s relevant to the content? YouTube

Always suggest videos from the same creator (so you should use brand, channel name tags)

Evaluated what people watch next and which video they ignore.

Displays video with the similar titles and keywords/tags

So what’s relevant to the viewers? YouTube

Learns your preferences, style, tasted

Considers what content might be interesting to an individual viewer: analyze viewing history, channel subscriptions, search history, viewing choices.

Richard Bennett

Richard Bennett is a writer and a lover of all things video.

Follow @Richard Bennett

Richard Bennett

Mar 27, 2024• Proven solutions

If there exists searches, there exists SEO. YouTube now is the second largest search engine which processes more than 3 billion searches in a single month. Besides making sure that each video you upload to YouTube offers thought-provoking content, you can also optimize the video in accordance with the rules of SEO to stand out from the 500 hours of videos uploaded per minutes.

If you are trying to learn more about the SEO optimization of YouTube videos, you’ve landed on the right page, because in this guide we are going to take you through the process of improving the search rankings for each video you upload to YouTube.

YouTube SEO Guide

Quick Jump Menu:

The guide covers these five aspects of YouTube SEO optimization:

• The Basics - Five Main Traffic Sources
• How to Come Up With SEO Topics?
• The Metadata Process
• Promoting Videos Using Off-Channel Marketing
• How to Monitor a Video’s Data?

The Basics - Five Main Traffic Sources

Producing a video and posting it on your YouTube channel is simply not enough to guarantee its success. You have to know where the video’s traffic will come from, because over 500 hours of video content are being uploaded each minute, and there are over 50 million content creators on the platform.

That’s the reason why you have to develop a strategy that will attract the traffic to your videos and place them high in the YouTube’s search rankings. Let’s have a look at five traffic sources that will boost the number of views and comments videos are getting.

YouTube Search

A great deal of traffic for your videos can come from the search results, which makes the title of a video one of the most important aspects of SEO optimization on YouTube.

Don’t use long titles, strive to use short and catchy titles that also contain keywords which accurately describe the contents of the video in order to appear higher in the YouTube’s search results.

Suggested Videos

The platform offers video suggestions that cover topics similar to those of the videos you already watched. Once more, the title and the description you provided will play a crucial role in driving more traffic to your videos, so make sure that each video you post on YouTube has an effective title that will spark interest in a potential viewer to take action and actually watch the video.

Suggested videos that appear next to the video

Suggested videos that appear after the video

Suggested videos that appear from links in a video description.

YouTube Advertising

Investing in the promotion of the content you’re posting on your channel can help you to generate more views, but different types of YouTube ads produce different results. Non-skippable ads never count as a view, while a skippable ad that lasts more than ten seconds must be viewed for at least thirty seconds in order to qualify as a view. All other types of YouTube ads require the viewer to click on them and play them so the YouTube Analytics can recognize the action as a view.

Channel Pages, Browse Features, Playlists

Channel Pages - This method of generating traffic includes views created by other channel owners as well as Topic Channels that are automatically created using the platform’s video discovery system. In either case, your videos are discovered through search results or video suggestions.

Browse Features - The homepage of your YouTube channel as well as the subscription feed and all other browse features can be a potential source of views for your videos. The YouTube users who watch a video on your channel can be either signed-in or signed-out, but the YouTube Analytics tool will still recognize their action as a view.

Playlists - Producing content other YouTubers will want to include in their playlists is one of the best ways to attract more traffic and increase the amount of views videos you upload to your YouTube channel are getting.

External Traffic Sources

Even though YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, sharing a link to a video on social media such as Twitter or Facebook or embedding it on your website can significantly increase the number of views the video is getting.

Sources of traffic mentioned above are not equally effective, because the intent to actually watch the video varies greatly for each source. That’s why you’ll be able to achieve the best results if you combine several, if not all sources of traffic described in this guide.

How to Come Up With SEO Topics

Videos are a form of communication, and like with all forms of communication, you must know who you are addressing in order to know what to say. Defining the target audience before you start creating a video will make the SEO optimization process much simpler and much faster.

Let’s say that you want to become a successful beauty vlogger and your aim is to produce makeup tutorials. Your first step should be to determine which market is the most relevant for you. Assuming you’d like to target the Asian market, it becomes obvious that the audience you’ll be addressing will consist of women in need of practical makeup advice and your colleagues who offer similar types of tutorials.

Now that you’ve defined your target audience you can proceed to develop the content strategy. People search videos for many different reasons, but their motivation can be approximately divided into four micro-moments. These are:

I want to know, I want to go, I want to do and I want to buy moments and some or all can be applied to all types of YouTube videos.

I want to know moments refer to YouTube users who want to learn more about a certain topic and often ask how to perform a certain action. In the beauty niche, the search terms may include questions like ‘Is makeup bad for your skin?’ or ‘What is contouring?’.

I want to do moments reflect a certain need the potential viewer of your videos has, and your video should provide a straightforward answer. Most common I want to do search patterns for beauty vloggers are ‘How to apply mascara, eyeliner, etc..’

If you know quite a bit about beauty products, then producing videos that rely on I want to buy moments is a sure way to attract a lot of traffic to your videos. These include product reviews, top ten videos or comparison videos that offer the reasons for and against buying a certain product.

Furthermore, you should try to think of a way to create a makeup video that makes the viewer feel involved, so even if you are just explaining the basic terms or tools in the video, viewers should have the feeling that they are learning something.

After defining your target audience and determining what you have to offer, you can choose the topic based on keywords. Here’s how you can easily come up with keyword ideas for your YouTube videos.

How to find the right keywords ideas?

YouTube Search Suggestions:

This is by far the easiest and fastest way to come up with an SEO friendly topic for a video. The best part is that the keywords you come up with will work without a doubt since all suggestions are based on search terms actual people have already used.

Copy the Keywords From a Video in Your Niche that Already Has a Lot of Views:

Study the competition and find a few channels with hundreds of thousands of subscribers that cover the same topics as you. These channels probably have a significant number of videos so just sort them out using the ‘Most Popular’ option.

Click on a video that has the most views and that also has a topic that isn’t far removed from what you want to do. When the video is open, look for the keyword around which it is centered, in the title, description or tags and just find a creative way to incorporate it into your video.

Use YouTube’s Traffic Sources and Search Report:

If you would like to find out which keywords YouTubers have used to find your videos this is your best option. Even though the chances are you’ll know most keywords in the report since you already used them for SEO optimization of your videos, you might come up with a few unexpected entries that might be useful.

Look for low-competition keywords, because frequently used keywords are already used by videos featured on channels that have a lot of followers. Low-competition keywords can be particularly helpful if you are trying to grow your channel since they might attract more viewers than the most obvious keyword choices.

YouTube keyword tools:

https://filmora.wondershare.com/vlogger/youtube-keyword-tools.html

The Metadata Process

Now that you’ve found the best keywords for a video you’d like to upload to your YouTube channel, you should do everything in your power to maximize its SEO value. The following YouTube Ranking factors all play a part in the success your video will enjoy:

• On Video (Metadata)
• Recommendations
• Channel
• User Action

As you can see, metadata is directly related to the search rankings performance of your videos. So what is metadata exactly?

Video file name: The SEO optimization of a YouTube video starts even before you upload the file to your channel. When naming a video file, make sure that the name contains a keyword, because the platform’s algorithm will analyze it and use it to determine how high it should be ranked in the search results.

Video title: The title of a YouTube video is added after the upload is complete. So, in order to increase the video’s chances of appearing high in the search results, you should place the keyword at its begging and avoid using titles longer than 70 characters as much as you can.

Description: The more words you use to describe a video, the better. YouTube descriptions can have up to 5000 characters, which gives you quite a lot of room to use the keywords you’ve selected.

Tags: You can hardly use too many tags, as a matter of fact, you should use as many tags as you can think of. Channel name, brand name, related keywords are all great choices for tags, just keep in mind that they can’t be longer than 127 characters.

YouTube tag generator:

http://www.betterwaytoweb.com/tag-generator-for-youtube

Transcript: Chances are that the keyword around which your video is based appears quite a lot in the narration and dialogue. YouTube lets you create transcripts of all your videos in just a few simple clicks, which enables you to take the SEO optimization a step further.

Promoting Videos Using Off-Channel Marketing

One of the greatest advantages YouTube offers is how easy it is to share the links to your videos on social media or anywhere else on the Internet. These off-channel marketing methods can help you drive more traffic to the videos you upload to YouTube:

Embedding the Link: Articles covering topics similar to the topic your video is covering are a perfect place to embed a link to the video featured on your channel. What’s more, you can embed a link in your blog posts, on your website, or on a website of a partner company.

Backlinks: A backlink is a link from some other website to the particular web resource, in this case, your video. You can insert links that offer additional information about the topic and by doing so increase the traffic.

Third-party Website Promotion: Share links to videos you upload to YouTube on websites like Quora or forums such as Filmora.io.

Team up with Other YouTube Creators: Looking for cooperation on Fiverr, or just send them private messages to ask for recommendation/follow. Add your video in their playlist, or in Related Channel, End-screen card, etc.

How to Monitor a Video’s Data?

YouTube Analytics is a tool that will enable you to find out more about the people who are watching your videos. How many of your subscribers have watched a video you added to your channel? How many viewers found a video you uploaded through search results? The answer to these questions can be easily found with this tool.

YouTube Analytics also provides insight into subscriber conversion rates, so you can know exactly which videos attracted the most subscribers. This feature is particularly important if you are still developing your channel since it can help you understand which type of videos inspired a viewer to take action and hit the Subscribe button

Combining the information supplied by the YouTube Analytics with the data Google Analytics can offer will allow you to get to know the viewers of your videos better, which can be useful when planning the topics of the videos you’d like to upload to your YouTube channel in the future. If you’d like to gain access to more advanced statistics, there are a lot of free and paid YouTube analytics tools that enable you to keep track of the number of video comments, rankings, dislikes, likes, video replies or favorites.

Each of these metrics serves as a building block of a successful YouTube channel because uploading a video during a weekend or during the working days may not produce the same results. The YouTube analytics tools can assist you in staying one step ahead of your competition and increasing the number of subscribers to your YouTube channel.

A Few Final Thoughts

Just keep these fundamental things into your mind when you’re doing YouTube SEO:

YouTube will do anything they can to keep viewer watch longer

So what’s relevant to the content? YouTube

Always suggest videos from the same creator (so you should use brand, channel name tags)

Evaluated what people watch next and which video they ignore.

Displays video with the similar titles and keywords/tags

So what’s relevant to the viewers? YouTube

Learns your preferences, style, tasted

Considers what content might be interesting to an individual viewer: analyze viewing history, channel subscriptions, search history, viewing choices.

Richard Bennett

Richard Bennett is a writer and a lover of all things video.

Follow @Richard Bennett

Instantaneous Timestamping for Your YouTube URLs

How to Add Timestamps on YouTube Video Link?

Richard Bennett

Mar 27, 2024• Proven solutions

It is a well-known fact that internet users have a short interest span, about just eight seconds. This attention span applies to all internet platforms including YouTube. YouTube is the second largest and most visited search engine after Google. It provides users with information through engaging and eye-catchy videos. However, certain videos are longer where only a particular section of the video holds the important information. Viewers tend to skip the long videos and if you do not want this to happen to you, you can link to that specific part on your video adding value for your channel viewers with a link known as the YouTube Timestamp link.

When you have a Timestamp link on your video, you can help your viewers directly reach the specific time in the video. This helps avoid the viewers from losing interest or to search for the key part in your video themselves.

Here in this article, we will explain Timestamp links, how to add Timestamp to YouTube video links, and what are the benefits of Timestamp.

• Part 1: YouTube Timestamp Links Introduction
• Part 2: Adding a Timestamp to YouTube Video Link on Desktop
• Part 3: How to Share Specific Parts of YouTube Video
• part 4: Getting YouTube Timestamp Link on Mobile
• Part 5: FAQ About YouTube Timestamps

Part 1: What is YouTube Timestamp Links

In this fast-paced world where viewers have limited time at hand, YouTube Timestamp links are extremely helpful. These links are anchor text or video hyperlinks found either in the description beneath the video or at the video link end.

The Timestamps links allow you to put a link to a key moment in your YouTube video allowing the viewers and subscribers to view the video at the precise time specified. Your YouTube video maybe half an hour long or maybe your users do not have the time now or forget to later watch your video, but when you add Timestamp to the YouTube link, you provide them ways to get to the content quickly enhancing the user experience.

In addition to this, you can even provide a reference in minutes and hours where necessary. The YouTube Timestamp link acts as a guide that directs viewers to the part of the video, which is most relevant to them without having to watch the entire video.

Part 2: How to Add a Timestamp to YouTube Video Link on Desktop?

In the following section, I will show you how to add timestamp to YouTube video link in several ways.

Use YouTube’s Share Feature

Using YouTube’s share feature is the simplest way to add Timestamp to YouTube videos. Here are easy steps to follow to do this.

1. Open the YouTube video on your desktop that you want to share.
2. Play the video or navigate the timeline and stop at the key moment you wish to apply the timestamp to.
3. Now click on the Share button, a pop-up will appear. Under the URL, you will see a small box indicating Start at. The Timestamp is generated automatically, but you can adjust it.

1. Copy the updated URL with Timestamp to share the video or click on the social sharing icons to do so.
2. When your viewers click on this URL, the video will begin at the specified Timestamp.

Use the Browser URL to add Timestamp manually

You can add Timestamp manually as well. Follow the step-by-step guide below to add a Timestamp manually.

1. Open your YouTube video in a browser on your desktop and then find the URL in the browser’s address bar.
2. Enter the specific time you want the viewers to watch the video from at the end of the video URL.

You can add time manually in two ways depending on the URL.

?t=As or

&t=As

“youtu.be/” Format

If your YouTube video link is a youtu.be format, then just add ?t=As at the end of the video link. The A denotes the seconds at which you want the viewer to watch your video. The time can also be specified in minutes and seconds and when you want to do that just add ?t=AmBs. For instance, ?t=2m40s.

“youtube.com/” Format

When your YouTube video link has a youtube.com format, the adjustment starts with an ampersand. &t=As or &t=AmBs is what you can use. If you are looking to add the Timestamp at 2m40s, just add “&t=2m40s at the end of the video URL.

Whenever anybody uses the URL with Timestamp, the video will start from the specified time.

However, when adding a Timestamp manually, always leave include whole numbers. For example, if the time starts at 4m, use 4 and not 04.

Copy video URL at current time

You can use YouTube’s built-in feature to share the key parts of your YouTube video. Follow the steps here.

1. Visit YouTube and open the video you want to add Timestamp link to.
2. Play the video or navigate the timeline to reach the specific part you like to use in Timestamp.
3. Now either press Ctrl + click or right-click anywhere on the video. A pop-up opens where you can see various texts, click on the Copy video URL at current time and share the link.

1. Anyone who clicks on this link will be instantly transported to the exact segment of your YouTube video.

Part 3: How to Share Specific Parts of Videos with Vibby and Get YouTube Link with Timestamp

The above-mentioned methods to add and send YouTube link with timestamp are quick and easy, but they have a few limitations. If you need more control and share highlighted parts of YouTube video without cutting the video, you need to use a third-party tool known as Vibby.

Vibby allows you to not only share specific parts of videos from YouTube but other platforms as well like Vimeo and Twitch. With the tool, you can clip multiple sections of the video and share them with others.

1. To get started, signup either with mail, Google, Twitter, Facebook, or Twitch account.
2. Once signed in, go to Create vib at the top left corner and then paste the URL of the YouTube video you would like to share and then click on the Start button.

1. Your video will load in the Vibby editor, now click on Highlight the parts to share.
2. Here you will see the Start highlight button, jump 5-sec option, option to switch between HD and SD video quality, and volume control button. Navigate to the part you want to share and click on Start highlight.

1. When you reach the end of the part, click on Finish highlight. Repeat the process to highlight multiple parts of the video. All the highlighted parts will appear in a list on the right side of the screen.
2. Add a description to each part and format it, you have the option to preview before hitting the Save vib button.
3. Name the vib and assign a category and then publish it to Vibby or make it a private vib.
4. You get a dedicated link to your vib with the ability to embed it on your website or blog.

In this way, you can share the highlights of the YouTube video or Vimeo video easily.

Part 4: How to Get YouTube Timestamp Link on iPhone and Android?

Linking to specific YouTube Timestamp Link is straightforward on both iPhone and Android.

1. Go to YouTube and select the video you want to share.
2. Move through the progress bar of the video to reach the key part and click on the Share button.
3. A pop-up menu appears, highlight the URL and click on the Copy button.
4. Paste the URL and manually add the Timestamp using the steps mentioned in add a Timestamp manually.

Part 5: Is Timestamp Beneficial for your Video?

Timestamping your YouTube videos may decrease the watch time, but it enhances the user experience, and they want to see more of your videos. Apart from this, adding Timestamps to your videos make your videos discoverable through Google search. YouTube and Google will reward you for the videos in form of a high search engine ranking.

Bonus: How to Add YouTube Timestamp Link in YouTube Video Description

Adding a YouTube Timestamp link in your video description is easy. Here are the steps to do so.

1. Go to your YouTube channel and select the video you want to add Timestamp to and then navigate to the description below it.
2. Edit the description by clicking on the Edit Video button.
3. You are redirected to the Video Details page. Here write 0:00 at the first part of the timecode, and then continue with the time of the key part of the video you want to add the Timestamp to in 2:40 format. You can add more Timestamp as well and then click on the Save button.

1. Reload the video page and you will see auto-generated Timestamp Links at the specific time you provided in the description.

Note: You need to add at least three timestamps which are 10 seconds or longer in order to add timestamps successfully.

Conclusion

As much as possible YouTubers want to make videos short and to the point. However, if a video needs to be longer, you can still help users navigate through to find what is important to them by adding Timestamp to YouTube link or Timestamp the YouTube descriptions. This can help your viewers jump straight to the interesting part in the video, rather than viewing the entire video saving their time and boost user experience.

Richard Bennett

Richard Bennett is a writer and a lover of all things video.

Follow @Richard Bennett

Richard Bennett

Mar 27, 2024• Proven solutions

It is a well-known fact that internet users have a short interest span, about just eight seconds. This attention span applies to all internet platforms including YouTube. YouTube is the second largest and most visited search engine after Google. It provides users with information through engaging and eye-catchy videos. However, certain videos are longer where only a particular section of the video holds the important information. Viewers tend to skip the long videos and if you do not want this to happen to you, you can link to that specific part on your video adding value for your channel viewers with a link known as the YouTube Timestamp link.

When you have a Timestamp link on your video, you can help your viewers directly reach the specific time in the video. This helps avoid the viewers from losing interest or to search for the key part in your video themselves.

Here in this article, we will explain Timestamp links, how to add Timestamp to YouTube video links, and what are the benefits of Timestamp.

• Part 1: YouTube Timestamp Links Introduction
• Part 2: Adding a Timestamp to YouTube Video Link on Desktop
• Part 3: How to Share Specific Parts of YouTube Video
• part 4: Getting YouTube Timestamp Link on Mobile
• Part 5: FAQ About YouTube Timestamps

Part 1: What is YouTube Timestamp Links

In this fast-paced world where viewers have limited time at hand, YouTube Timestamp links are extremely helpful. These links are anchor text or video hyperlinks found either in the description beneath the video or at the video link end.

The Timestamps links allow you to put a link to a key moment in your YouTube video allowing the viewers and subscribers to view the video at the precise time specified. Your YouTube video maybe half an hour long or maybe your users do not have the time now or forget to later watch your video, but when you add Timestamp to the YouTube link, you provide them ways to get to the content quickly enhancing the user experience.

In addition to this, you can even provide a reference in minutes and hours where necessary. The YouTube Timestamp link acts as a guide that directs viewers to the part of the video, which is most relevant to them without having to watch the entire video.

Part 2: How to Add a Timestamp to YouTube Video Link on Desktop?

In the following section, I will show you how to add timestamp to YouTube video link in several ways.

Use YouTube’s Share Feature

Using YouTube’s share feature is the simplest way to add Timestamp to YouTube videos. Here are easy steps to follow to do this.

1. Open the YouTube video on your desktop that you want to share.
2. Play the video or navigate the timeline and stop at the key moment you wish to apply the timestamp to.
3. Now click on the Share button, a pop-up will appear. Under the URL, you will see a small box indicating Start at. The Timestamp is generated automatically, but you can adjust it.

1. Copy the updated URL with Timestamp to share the video or click on the social sharing icons to do so.
2. When your viewers click on this URL, the video will begin at the specified Timestamp.

Use the Browser URL to add Timestamp manually

You can add Timestamp manually as well. Follow the step-by-step guide below to add a Timestamp manually.

1. Open your YouTube video in a browser on your desktop and then find the URL in the browser’s address bar.
2. Enter the specific time you want the viewers to watch the video from at the end of the video URL.

You can add time manually in two ways depending on the URL.

?t=As or

&t=As

“youtu.be/” Format

If your YouTube video link is a youtu.be format, then just add ?t=As at the end of the video link. The A denotes the seconds at which you want the viewer to watch your video. The time can also be specified in minutes and seconds and when you want to do that just add ?t=AmBs. For instance, ?t=2m40s.

“youtube.com/” Format

When your YouTube video link has a youtube.com format, the adjustment starts with an ampersand. &t=As or &t=AmBs is what you can use. If you are looking to add the Timestamp at 2m40s, just add “&t=2m40s at the end of the video URL.

Whenever anybody uses the URL with Timestamp, the video will start from the specified time.

However, when adding a Timestamp manually, always leave include whole numbers. For example, if the time starts at 4m, use 4 and not 04.

Copy video URL at current time

You can use YouTube’s built-in feature to share the key parts of your YouTube video. Follow the steps here.

1. Visit YouTube and open the video you want to add Timestamp link to.
2. Play the video or navigate the timeline to reach the specific part you like to use in Timestamp.
3. Now either press Ctrl + click or right-click anywhere on the video. A pop-up opens where you can see various texts, click on the Copy video URL at current time and share the link.

1. Anyone who clicks on this link will be instantly transported to the exact segment of your YouTube video.

Part 3: How to Share Specific Parts of Videos with Vibby and Get YouTube Link with Timestamp

The above-mentioned methods to add and send YouTube link with timestamp are quick and easy, but they have a few limitations. If you need more control and share highlighted parts of YouTube video without cutting the video, you need to use a third-party tool known as Vibby.

Vibby allows you to not only share specific parts of videos from YouTube but other platforms as well like Vimeo and Twitch. With the tool, you can clip multiple sections of the video and share them with others.

1. To get started, signup either with mail, Google, Twitter, Facebook, or Twitch account.
2. Once signed in, go to Create vib at the top left corner and then paste the URL of the YouTube video you would like to share and then click on the Start button.

1. Your video will load in the Vibby editor, now click on Highlight the parts to share.
2. Here you will see the Start highlight button, jump 5-sec option, option to switch between HD and SD video quality, and volume control button. Navigate to the part you want to share and click on Start highlight.

1. When you reach the end of the part, click on Finish highlight. Repeat the process to highlight multiple parts of the video. All the highlighted parts will appear in a list on the right side of the screen.
2. Add a description to each part and format it, you have the option to preview before hitting the Save vib button.
3. Name the vib and assign a category and then publish it to Vibby or make it a private vib.
4. You get a dedicated link to your vib with the ability to embed it on your website or blog.

In this way, you can share the highlights of the YouTube video or Vimeo video easily.

Part 4: How to Get YouTube Timestamp Link on iPhone and Android?

Linking to specific YouTube Timestamp Link is straightforward on both iPhone and Android.

1. Go to YouTube and select the video you want to share.
2. Move through the progress bar of the video to reach the key part and click on the Share button.
3. A pop-up menu appears, highlight the URL and click on the Copy button.
4. Paste the URL and manually add the Timestamp using the steps mentioned in add a Timestamp manually.

Part 5: Is Timestamp Beneficial for your Video?

Timestamping your YouTube videos may decrease the watch time, but it enhances the user experience, and they want to see more of your videos. Apart from this, adding Timestamps to your videos make your videos discoverable through Google search. YouTube and Google will reward you for the videos in form of a high search engine ranking.

Bonus: How to Add YouTube Timestamp Link in YouTube Video Description

Adding a YouTube Timestamp link in your video description is easy. Here are the steps to do so.

1. Go to your YouTube channel and select the video you want to add Timestamp to and then navigate to the description below it.
2. Edit the description by clicking on the Edit Video button.
3. You are redirected to the Video Details page. Here write 0:00 at the first part of the timecode, and then continue with the time of the key part of the video you want to add the Timestamp to in 2:40 format. You can add more Timestamp as well and then click on the Save button.

1. Reload the video page and you will see auto-generated Timestamp Links at the specific time you provided in the description.

Note: You need to add at least three timestamps which are 10 seconds or longer in order to add timestamps successfully.

Conclusion

As much as possible YouTubers want to make videos short and to the point. However, if a video needs to be longer, you can still help users navigate through to find what is important to them by adding Timestamp to YouTube link or Timestamp the YouTube descriptions. This can help your viewers jump straight to the interesting part in the video, rather than viewing the entire video saving their time and boost user experience.

Richard Bennett

Richard Bennett is a writer and a lover of all things video.

Follow @Richard Bennett

Richard Bennett

Mar 27, 2024• Proven solutions

It is a well-known fact that internet users have a short interest span, about just eight seconds. This attention span applies to all internet platforms including YouTube. YouTube is the second largest and most visited search engine after Google. It provides users with information through engaging and eye-catchy videos. However, certain videos are longer where only a particular section of the video holds the important information. Viewers tend to skip the long videos and if you do not want this to happen to you, you can link to that specific part on your video adding value for your channel viewers with a link known as the YouTube Timestamp link.

When you have a Timestamp link on your video, you can help your viewers directly reach the specific time in the video. This helps avoid the viewers from losing interest or to search for the key part in your video themselves.

Here in this article, we will explain Timestamp links, how to add Timestamp to YouTube video links, and what are the benefits of Timestamp.

• Part 1: YouTube Timestamp Links Introduction
• Part 2: Adding a Timestamp to YouTube Video Link on Desktop
• Part 3: How to Share Specific Parts of YouTube Video
• part 4: Getting YouTube Timestamp Link on Mobile
• Part 5: FAQ About YouTube Timestamps

Part 1: What is YouTube Timestamp Links

In this fast-paced world where viewers have limited time at hand, YouTube Timestamp links are extremely helpful. These links are anchor text or video hyperlinks found either in the description beneath the video or at the video link end.

The Timestamps links allow you to put a link to a key moment in your YouTube video allowing the viewers and subscribers to view the video at the precise time specified. Your YouTube video maybe half an hour long or maybe your users do not have the time now or forget to later watch your video, but when you add Timestamp to the YouTube link, you provide them ways to get to the content quickly enhancing the user experience.

In addition to this, you can even provide a reference in minutes and hours where necessary. The YouTube Timestamp link acts as a guide that directs viewers to the part of the video, which is most relevant to them without having to watch the entire video.

Part 2: How to Add a Timestamp to YouTube Video Link on Desktop?

In the following section, I will show you how to add timestamp to YouTube video link in several ways.

Use YouTube’s Share Feature

Using YouTube’s share feature is the simplest way to add Timestamp to YouTube videos. Here are easy steps to follow to do this.

1. Open the YouTube video on your desktop that you want to share.
2. Play the video or navigate the timeline and stop at the key moment you wish to apply the timestamp to.
3. Now click on the Share button, a pop-up will appear. Under the URL, you will see a small box indicating Start at. The Timestamp is generated automatically, but you can adjust it.

1. Copy the updated URL with Timestamp to share the video or click on the social sharing icons to do so.
2. When your viewers click on this URL, the video will begin at the specified Timestamp.

Use the Browser URL to add Timestamp manually

You can add Timestamp manually as well. Follow the step-by-step guide below to add a Timestamp manually.

1. Open your YouTube video in a browser on your desktop and then find the URL in the browser’s address bar.
2. Enter the specific time you want the viewers to watch the video from at the end of the video URL.

You can add time manually in two ways depending on the URL.

?t=As or

&t=As

“youtu.be/” Format

If your YouTube video link is a youtu.be format, then just add ?t=As at the end of the video link. The A denotes the seconds at which you want the viewer to watch your video. The time can also be specified in minutes and seconds and when you want to do that just add ?t=AmBs. For instance, ?t=2m40s.

“youtube.com/” Format

When your YouTube video link has a youtube.com format, the adjustment starts with an ampersand. &t=As or &t=AmBs is what you can use. If you are looking to add the Timestamp at 2m40s, just add “&t=2m40s at the end of the video URL.

Whenever anybody uses the URL with Timestamp, the video will start from the specified time.

However, when adding a Timestamp manually, always leave include whole numbers. For example, if the time starts at 4m, use 4 and not 04.

Copy video URL at current time

You can use YouTube’s built-in feature to share the key parts of your YouTube video. Follow the steps here.

1. Visit YouTube and open the video you want to add Timestamp link to.
2. Play the video or navigate the timeline to reach the specific part you like to use in Timestamp.
3. Now either press Ctrl + click or right-click anywhere on the video. A pop-up opens where you can see various texts, click on the Copy video URL at current time and share the link.

1. Anyone who clicks on this link will be instantly transported to the exact segment of your YouTube video.

Part 3: How to Share Specific Parts of Videos with Vibby and Get YouTube Link with Timestamp

The above-mentioned methods to add and send YouTube link with timestamp are quick and easy, but they have a few limitations. If you need more control and share highlighted parts of YouTube video without cutting the video, you need to use a third-party tool known as Vibby.

Vibby allows you to not only share specific parts of videos from YouTube but other platforms as well like Vimeo and Twitch. With the tool, you can clip multiple sections of the video and share them with others.

1. To get started, signup either with mail, Google, Twitter, Facebook, or Twitch account.
2. Once signed in, go to Create vib at the top left corner and then paste the URL of the YouTube video you would like to share and then click on the Start button.

1. Your video will load in the Vibby editor, now click on Highlight the parts to share.
2. Here you will see the Start highlight button, jump 5-sec option, option to switch between HD and SD video quality, and volume control button. Navigate to the part you want to share and click on Start highlight.

1. When you reach the end of the part, click on Finish highlight. Repeat the process to highlight multiple parts of the video. All the highlighted parts will appear in a list on the right side of the screen.
2. Add a description to each part and format it, you have the option to preview before hitting the Save vib button.
3. Name the vib and assign a category and then publish it to Vibby or make it a private vib.
4. You get a dedicated link to your vib with the ability to embed it on your website or blog.

In this way, you can share the highlights of the YouTube video or Vimeo video easily.

Part 4: How to Get YouTube Timestamp Link on iPhone and Android?

Linking to specific YouTube Timestamp Link is straightforward on both iPhone and Android.

1. Go to YouTube and select the video you want to share.
2. Move through the progress bar of the video to reach the key part and click on the Share button.
3. A pop-up menu appears, highlight the URL and click on the Copy button.
4. Paste the URL and manually add the Timestamp using the steps mentioned in add a Timestamp manually.

Part 5: Is Timestamp Beneficial for your Video?

Timestamping your YouTube videos may decrease the watch time, but it enhances the user experience, and they want to see more of your videos. Apart from this, adding Timestamps to your videos make your videos discoverable through Google search. YouTube and Google will reward you for the videos in form of a high search engine ranking.

Bonus: How to Add YouTube Timestamp Link in YouTube Video Description

Adding a YouTube Timestamp link in your video description is easy. Here are the steps to do so.

1. Go to your YouTube channel and select the video you want to add Timestamp to and then navigate to the description below it.
2. Edit the description by clicking on the Edit Video button.
3. You are redirected to the Video Details page. Here write 0:00 at the first part of the timecode, and then continue with the time of the key part of the video you want to add the Timestamp to in 2:40 format. You can add more Timestamp as well and then click on the Save button.

1. Reload the video page and you will see auto-generated Timestamp Links at the specific time you provided in the description.

Note: You need to add at least three timestamps which are 10 seconds or longer in order to add timestamps successfully.

Conclusion

As much as possible YouTubers want to make videos short and to the point. However, if a video needs to be longer, you can still help users navigate through to find what is important to them by adding Timestamp to YouTube link or Timestamp the YouTube descriptions. This can help your viewers jump straight to the interesting part in the video, rather than viewing the entire video saving their time and boost user experience.

Richard Bennett

Richard Bennett is a writer and a lover of all things video.

Follow @Richard Bennett

Richard Bennett

Mar 27, 2024• Proven solutions

It is a well-known fact that internet users have a short interest span, about just eight seconds. This attention span applies to all internet platforms including YouTube. YouTube is the second largest and most visited search engine after Google. It provides users with information through engaging and eye-catchy videos. However, certain videos are longer where only a particular section of the video holds the important information. Viewers tend to skip the long videos and if you do not want this to happen to you, you can link to that specific part on your video adding value for your channel viewers with a link known as the YouTube Timestamp link.

When you have a Timestamp link on your video, you can help your viewers directly reach the specific time in the video. This helps avoid the viewers from losing interest or to search for the key part in your video themselves.

Here in this article, we will explain Timestamp links, how to add Timestamp to YouTube video links, and what are the benefits of Timestamp.

• Part 1: YouTube Timestamp Links Introduction
• Part 2: Adding a Timestamp to YouTube Video Link on Desktop
• Part 3: How to Share Specific Parts of YouTube Video
• part 4: Getting YouTube Timestamp Link on Mobile
• Part 5: FAQ About YouTube Timestamps

Part 1: What is YouTube Timestamp Links

In this fast-paced world where viewers have limited time at hand, YouTube Timestamp links are extremely helpful. These links are anchor text or video hyperlinks found either in the description beneath the video or at the video link end.

The Timestamps links allow you to put a link to a key moment in your YouTube video allowing the viewers and subscribers to view the video at the precise time specified. Your YouTube video maybe half an hour long or maybe your users do not have the time now or forget to later watch your video, but when you add Timestamp to the YouTube link, you provide them ways to get to the content quickly enhancing the user experience.

In addition to this, you can even provide a reference in minutes and hours where necessary. The YouTube Timestamp link acts as a guide that directs viewers to the part of the video, which is most relevant to them without having to watch the entire video.

Part 2: How to Add a Timestamp to YouTube Video Link on Desktop?

In the following section, I will show you how to add timestamp to YouTube video link in several ways.

Use YouTube’s Share Feature

Using YouTube’s share feature is the simplest way to add Timestamp to YouTube videos. Here are easy steps to follow to do this.

1. Open the YouTube video on your desktop that you want to share.
2. Play the video or navigate the timeline and stop at the key moment you wish to apply the timestamp to.
3. Now click on the Share button, a pop-up will appear. Under the URL, you will see a small box indicating Start at. The Timestamp is generated automatically, but you can adjust it.

1. Copy the updated URL with Timestamp to share the video or click on the social sharing icons to do so.
2. When your viewers click on this URL, the video will begin at the specified Timestamp.

Use the Browser URL to add Timestamp manually

You can add Timestamp manually as well. Follow the step-by-step guide below to add a Timestamp manually.

1. Open your YouTube video in a browser on your desktop and then find the URL in the browser’s address bar.
2. Enter the specific time you want the viewers to watch the video from at the end of the video URL.

You can add time manually in two ways depending on the URL.

?t=As or

&t=As

“youtu.be/” Format

If your YouTube video link is a youtu.be format, then just add ?t=As at the end of the video link. The A denotes the seconds at which you want the viewer to watch your video. The time can also be specified in minutes and seconds and when you want to do that just add ?t=AmBs. For instance, ?t=2m40s.

“youtube.com/” Format

When your YouTube video link has a youtube.com format, the adjustment starts with an ampersand. &t=As or &t=AmBs is what you can use. If you are looking to add the Timestamp at 2m40s, just add “&t=2m40s at the end of the video URL.

Whenever anybody uses the URL with Timestamp, the video will start from the specified time.

However, when adding a Timestamp manually, always leave include whole numbers. For example, if the time starts at 4m, use 4 and not 04.

Copy video URL at current time

You can use YouTube’s built-in feature to share the key parts of your YouTube video. Follow the steps here.

1. Visit YouTube and open the video you want to add Timestamp link to.
2. Play the video or navigate the timeline to reach the specific part you like to use in Timestamp.
3. Now either press Ctrl + click or right-click anywhere on the video. A pop-up opens where you can see various texts, click on the Copy video URL at current time and share the link.

1. Anyone who clicks on this link will be instantly transported to the exact segment of your YouTube video.

Part 3: How to Share Specific Parts of Videos with Vibby and Get YouTube Link with Timestamp

The above-mentioned methods to add and send YouTube link with timestamp are quick and easy, but they have a few limitations. If you need more control and share highlighted parts of YouTube video without cutting the video, you need to use a third-party tool known as Vibby.

Vibby allows you to not only share specific parts of videos from YouTube but other platforms as well like Vimeo and Twitch. With the tool, you can clip multiple sections of the video and share them with others.

1. To get started, signup either with mail, Google, Twitter, Facebook, or Twitch account.
2. Once signed in, go to Create vib at the top left corner and then paste the URL of the YouTube video you would like to share and then click on the Start button.

1. Your video will load in the Vibby editor, now click on Highlight the parts to share.
2. Here you will see the Start highlight button, jump 5-sec option, option to switch between HD and SD video quality, and volume control button. Navigate to the part you want to share and click on Start highlight.

1. When you reach the end of the part, click on Finish highlight. Repeat the process to highlight multiple parts of the video. All the highlighted parts will appear in a list on the right side of the screen.
2. Add a description to each part and format it, you have the option to preview before hitting the Save vib button.
3. Name the vib and assign a category and then publish it to Vibby or make it a private vib.
4. You get a dedicated link to your vib with the ability to embed it on your website or blog.

In this way, you can share the highlights of the YouTube video or Vimeo video easily.

Part 4: How to Get YouTube Timestamp Link on iPhone and Android?

Linking to specific YouTube Timestamp Link is straightforward on both iPhone and Android.

1. Go to YouTube and select the video you want to share.
2. Move through the progress bar of the video to reach the key part and click on the Share button.
3. A pop-up menu appears, highlight the URL and click on the Copy button.
4. Paste the URL and manually add the Timestamp using the steps mentioned in add a Timestamp manually.

Part 5: Is Timestamp Beneficial for your Video?

Timestamping your YouTube videos may decrease the watch time, but it enhances the user experience, and they want to see more of your videos. Apart from this, adding Timestamps to your videos make your videos discoverable through Google search. YouTube and Google will reward you for the videos in form of a high search engine ranking.

Bonus: How to Add YouTube Timestamp Link in YouTube Video Description

Adding a YouTube Timestamp link in your video description is easy. Here are the steps to do so.

1. Go to your YouTube channel and select the video you want to add Timestamp to and then navigate to the description below it.
2. Edit the description by clicking on the Edit Video button.
3. You are redirected to the Video Details page. Here write 0:00 at the first part of the timecode, and then continue with the time of the key part of the video you want to add the Timestamp to in 2:40 format. You can add more Timestamp as well and then click on the Save button.

1. Reload the video page and you will see auto-generated Timestamp Links at the specific time you provided in the description.

Note: You need to add at least three timestamps which are 10 seconds or longer in order to add timestamps successfully.

Conclusion

As much as possible YouTubers want to make videos short and to the point. However, if a video needs to be longer, you can still help users navigate through to find what is important to them by adding Timestamp to YouTube link or Timestamp the YouTube descriptions. This can help your viewers jump straight to the interesting part in the video, rather than viewing the entire video saving their time and boost user experience.

Richard Bennett

Richard Bennett is a writer and a lover of all things video.

Follow @Richard Bennett