Video content has been on a steady increase for quite some time now – partly because of the mass appeal of videos and partly because of the increased opportunities for video creators.

As the competition for viewers increase, video creators need to get smarter at work; that's if they want to get more viewers to watch their videos.

If you are a video or content creator of any kind, you’ll need to improve on making your videos more visible.

Here are the 5 best video SEO practices to help improve your search ranking and get you more viewers:

1 - Research Your Keywords

Keywords are those words or phrases that search engines use for ranking web content. They are also used for searching out content through the major search engines – meaning that you need to take keywords very seriously to ensure your videos get found on the internet.

The best way to do this is to perform thorough research about the keyword to use for every video you publish.

There are a number of online tools to use for your keyword research, tools like Jaaxy, Moz, SEMRush, Ahrefs, and many others. Or you do the research on your own using available data on the internet.

If you already have videos you've published in the past, go through the analytics and find out the best performing keywords. This information will prove very helpful as you work on the next set of videos you want to publish.

One more thing, you may have heard of long-tail keywords. They are keywords that comprise 4 words or more in length. And they are great for attracting lots of visitors from search engines.

Once you’ve got the right keywords to use, the goal of ranking higher becomes more feasible to accomplish.