It’s no secret that YouTube is a major force. Each month, the site receives more than one billion visitors and they watch six billion hours of video. If YouTube was a search engine, which some can argue is the case; it would be the second largest search engine. Given its popularity, YouTube videos show up in Google search results. For all these reasons, and more, video content can be a powerful SEO and marketing tool.

Just like any other, video content should be optimized to maximize the chance it will be found by search engines and your potential customers. And, making it engaging, enjoyable and share worthy only helps your cause.

Quality video content is important because YouTube values ratings given to videos. In addition, YouTube now values watch time over simple views, which were too easily faked in the past. Watch time is the amount of time spent watching a video. Obviously, the longer the better. This means you want to make sure your video is the right length. Long enough to trigger a good watch time score and short enough to keep watchers engaged to the end.

Trending topics are also a factor in how YouTube ranks videos. Try to tie into a hot topic or a recent trend in your video content. Google Trends is a free tool that helps you identify popular search phrases by determining how many searches have been done for the terms you’ve entered compared to the total number of Google searches done during that time. It provides insights into what users are searching for on YouTube.

So you could type in ‘Denver SEO in 2014’ to find out what percent of all Google searches for that time frame and location it represents. If it is a high percent then it is a relatively hot topic for that time period.

One of the simplest and often overlooked things you can do is to optimize the text and titles. YouTube can’t understand the content unless you tell them about it. You have 99 characters, which is ample space to add your keywords, some descriptive text and your branding. Titles and tags are a major factor in making your video more discoverable.