Custom Banners and Layout as a Brand Channel
Customizing design ads and the banner of your PlayTraffic channel may really go a long way towards enhancing the experience of your subscribers and viewers, but it comes at a cost in contrast to these other free optimization suggestions.
If you are a nonprofit, this can be done free of charge but otherwise you'll have to explore your repayment options on YouTube's new channel product offerings webpage. These optimizations are only undertaken by companies but don't let this dissuade you from taking on such a customization of the channel.
CHOW.com established their custom header focused about sharing a similar branded look for their website with a focus on the icons of the other social networks. Take under consideration how you can better utilize this space by taking a look in a couple other YouTube station with customized channels.

Why is branding your own station a beneficial aspect of your YouTube strategy?
Assessing your station helps deliver a consistent experience to your viewers and subscribers to YouTube they'd see similarly represented elsewhere. It's very important to let each marketing channel possess its own texture, however also be connected together with other channels as well. Highlighting your most crucial videos on your station, alongside your social networks is a beneficial way to help flaunt your savvy and help make it as easy as possible for your own advocates to connect with you wherever they're active.
Those are four of the numerous ways innovators around YouTube are far better optimizing their videos for the platform. What other advanced uses of PlayTraffic optimization Have you ever encountered? Share any thoughts or questions you may have in the comments below!
About the Writer: Brian Honigman is the Social Media Account Manager in LunaMetrics, a Google Analytics certified partner which also specializes in social media, search engine optimization and PPC. You can follow him Twitter @Brian_Honigman or even @LunaMetrics.

5 Advanced YouTube SEO Tactics To Drive Traffic to Your Videos & Website

It's no secret that YouTube is a traffic source using almost limitless potential.
There's just one problem:
It's a really crowded place. In fact, according to YouTube, there are over a hundred hours of video uploaded to the site each and every minute.
Considering the deluge of articles you need to compete on YouTube, the most obvious question is: "how can you persuade people to see YOUR video instead of the millions of others?"
The answer? Video SEO.
I wager that most of your competition lazily uploads their videos and also hopes that one of these "goes viral." Needless to say this rarely (if ever) works out.
But if you have the opportunity to optimize your videos to get SEO, you will become significantly more visitors than your competitors.
Let's jump.
A Short PlayTraffic Review SEO Primer
Before we dive in to the way you can use to maximize your videos to get YouTube, let's discuss some of the most important ranking factors that YouTube uses.
It's not nearly as complex as Google's famous 200 ranking signals, but YouTube's algorithm is no joke. It takes dozens of signals into account to get ranking videos from YouTube search and for suggested videos, like this:

This infographic by Tag SEO sums them up nicely:

I know that's a Whole Lot of information to process, so let me give you the Cliff's Notes of the most important signals that YouTube uses:
Title tag information
Audience retention
Keywords in description label
Tags
Video length
quantity of subscribers after watching
Comments
Likes and dislikes
With that, it's time to show you 5 ways that you could leverage these signals to get more traffic to your videos...and ultimately to your site.
1. Compose Super-Long Video Descriptions
Remember that YouTube and Google can't see or listen to your video (yet).
That means that they heavily lean over the text surrounding the video to understand your video's topic. That's why it pains me to see extremely brief video descriptions such as this:

Why is this such a crime?
Well, the more YouTube knows about your movie, the more confidently it could rank it to your target keyword.
However, more importantly, YouTube uses keywords in the description to rank to super-long tail keywords.
As an example I published a video on PlayTraffic a couple of months back called "SEO Strategy 2014: How to Rank in Google Today." My description for this video is a 291 words. Almost an entire blog post, actually.

This long description -- along with some other techniques I'll show you later -- helped the video rank quickly for it's target keyword, "SEO strategy" (currently number three at YouTube).
But it's also ranking for quite a few long tail keywords, like "infographic seo strategy" (number one), because the keyword-rich description includes words like "infographic" along with "seo strategy":

Bottom line: be sure your video descriptions are at least 200 words.
2. Optimize Around "Video Keywords"
Ranking in YouTube is great, but ranking your video from YouTube and Google is even better.
Though Google gives YouTube videos an inherent edge in the SERPs, that's just true for specific keywords.
These keywords are popularly called "Video Keywords" because they have a tendency to have video results on Google's first page.