Internet users love video. Some 75 million videos are played every day on YouTube alone, attracting billions of views worldwide. So if you are not already using video as part of your marketing mix for your website, now’s the time to get started.

Research shows that website pages with video are 50 times more likely to show up on the first page of Google search results.

Google, Bing and Yahoo all have video indexes – so to get yours found online, follow our 7-step optimisation plan. Remember: the more views it gets, the better its ranking.

1. Keyword Research

Just like text content on a Website page, you need to optimise your video content. So step one is to find out what users are searching for and to help mine keywords and phrases you may not have thought of.

Try YouTube’s own keyword tool or Google’s Search-based Keyword Tool

2. Video Title

THE most important field to optimise for on YouTube. You have 100 characters but only the first 60 are displayed – so focus on these.

3. Description

You’re allowed 5,000 characters on YouTube but don’t waffle. After 150 characters, your description is cut off in the text results. Plus, only about 70 characters of text show on your actual video page until the users clicks on the drop down menu.

So, include your website URL at the very beginning of the description. This is the only link from YouTube to direct people to your website. Adding it here will give it full prominence.

4. Tags

Use the search terms from your title and description and any other relevant keyphrases from your research, so that users can find you.

5. Allow comments and syndication

Inviting feedback is good, and the more "likes" your video gets, the better. You can prompt people to give it the thumbs up in your description. So enable users to add comments and also set your video to public. Allow syndication too as this will give your video a wider audience with other channels such as mobile.

6. Embedding & Inbound Links

Create a link to the video from your own website, then boost views by embedding it on other websites and sharing it on forums and through social media or perhaps via email links to customers or subscribers. Inbound links from other sites are good for rankings.

7. Create a video sitemap

Videos are not automatically indexable by search engines, which rely on meta data to categorise them. So create a sitemap – a short document – spelling out what your video is and what it contains, then submit to Google and Bing.

For detailed information, visit Google’s video sitemap page