The IT Facts

"YouTube is the second largest search engine after Google, according to Reelseo and ComSore."

In December 2009 YouTube had 50 % more searches than Yahoo web search and 180 % more than Bing.

YouTube searches grew 35 percent year over year to more than 3.9 billion search queries. It accounts for 28 % of all Google searches.

Many companies have a goal to utilize Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – to get their website to be responsive to search engines and users. They can do this by understanding keywords and modify titles and content appropriately.

But what about YouTube, (28%) of all Google searches, how can a company participate? Two points to consider when creating a YouTube initiative.

First, YouTube and Google (who owns YouTube) look at video content differently than text. For text, the “crawler” moves through all of the content. Creators of the text content have certain guidelines as far as titles and headings that help give the crawler pointers to key words and content bits. For video, the crawler cannot see what is in the video. It has to rely on your title, description and keywords. Consequently, when you post up your video, you have 25 to 50 words to connect with the search engine.