If you create YouTube videos to post throughout your website and blog, you might as well optimize them to rank in YouTube as well. Every little bit of traffic helps, and searchers in general are seeking out video content more now than ever before.

So, how can you accomplish this?

Brian Dean’s team at Backlinko researched 1.3 million YouTube videos and shared these highlights/tips:

1. Keywords Share a Weak Association with High Rankings

Believe it or not, video tags optimized with keywords didn’t share much of a correlation with high rankings. While you should still employ this strategy because it does help, in general, you’ll gain much better results from focusing your time elsewhere. And here’s why…

2. Engagement Signals Strongly Influence Video Rankings

Think about this for a second…YouTube doesn’t want the perfectly optimized video atop its rankings any more than Google wants the perfectly optimized web page at the top of search. Why? Because optimization doesn’t reveal how much searchers actually like a specific piece of content.

While optimization gives YouTube an idea of which searches your video should rank for, engagement signals—such as the number of video views, comments, shares, and likes—are in fact strongly correlated with high rankings. It’s therefore not optimization but instead your ability to produce video content your audience likes (and how well you promote your videos) that hits the mark here. Google search works on the same general concept.

3. Video Length

In short, don’t make a long video just to rank. If you focus on length only, you’ll sacrifice the afore-mentioned engagement signals because your content will lack value. Instead, zero in on utility and let the chips fall where they may when it comes to length.

The more value you can provide to your audience, the better. That’s what keeps them watching and then taking action via sharing, commenting, liking, and subscribing.

For reference, at the time of their research, Brian Dean’s team found the average length of a video on YouTube’s first page was 14 minutes, 50 seconds.

4. HD is a MUST

Put simply, this one’s a no-brainer and (let’s be honest) requires no further explanation. ‘Nuff said.