Anyone familiar with online marketing should be no stranger to keyword research. Before you build a PPC campaign, write an article, or register a domain, you should first do your research and figure out which specific search terms (keywords) you should target. The ideal keywords are those that have high search volume, little competition (or as little as possible), and of course those that are proven to result in conversions (leads/sales).

Google Adwords provides a powerful keyword research tool that allows you to see the approximate monthly search volume for any given keyword, along with the search volume of related keywords. Of course, this data only reflects what people are searching on Google. How do you effectively do keyword research specifically for YouTube? Well, my method definitely does not give you the same detailed information that you can get doing keyword research for search engines, but it is still a very effective one.

When you type into the search field on YouTube, you’ll notice that you are given suggestions based on the characters you enter. For instance, if you just type the letter “T”, a drop down of suggested search terms will appear. Since they are not listed alphabetically, it makes sense to assume that they are probably listed in order of highest search volume/popularity.

(example)

As you can see, the first suggestion for the letter “T” is “T.I.”, a very popular rapper who has had a number one single for several weeks now (”Whatever You Like”). The vast majority of the number one search terms for each letter of the alphabet belong to a popular band/artist.

What’s the best way to monetize these? Ringtones, in my opinion. But there are certainly other ways. I strongly encourage you to experiment. However, the number one suggested terms might have a little too much competition for you to compete with if you are new to gaming YouTube. Also, YouTube’s filters are best at catching the most popular songs/videos and flagging them as infringement. You might want to try to tackle terms that are further down the list a bit.

Once you’ve decided on search terms, it’s time to create relevant videos. I like to use Zamzar to convert/download YouTube videos. There are plenty of tools and add-ons that can be used to download vidoes directly from YouTube, but then you’re stuck with an .FLV file, and a lot of video editing software won’t support that format (and you NEED to add your own watermark, at the very least). I usually convert to .avi or .wmv. If you want to download the high-quality version, just append “&fmt=18″ (without the quotation marks) to the end of the URL and choose .mp4 as the file type you’d like it converted to (again, check to make sure your video editing software supports it).

Once you’ve got your videos ready to go, be sure to upload them with the proper title/tags. Some people feel that adding the keyword to the description also helps, but I haven’t seen any significant impact in video performance with or without the keyword there. If you do decide to add keywords to the description, make sure you enter them AFTER your URL. Otherwise your clickable URL won’t even be visible to visitors unless they click the “more info” link to expand the description box (and most don’t).

Now, your videos will have a healthy dose of YouTube SEO. Videos that rank well on YouTube also tend to rank favorably in Google’s search results, meaning that once you’ve got your videos properly tagged, you’ll also start receiving organic traffic from outside of YouTube.

Oh yeah, I forgot the last step: Profit!