Add Subtitles & Transcripts To YouTube To Help With Video Search Engine Optimization 

You can hope that Google and YouTube guess what your video is about or you can tell them!  Video Search Engine Optimization is the process of letting search engines know what your video is about so the search engine can show your video based on your keywords.   Every video you add to YouTube should include tags and a title that specifically describe your video.   Google and other search engines will use those tags and titles to index your video.

Tags help but if you want Google to know exactly what is being said in your video you can simply add subtitles or a transcript to your video with the exact words being spoken.  If you create a video about green tractors and the people in the video speak a lot about green tractors your video is much more likely to show up in Google and other search engines.  If the subtitles / transcript has many instance of the words ‘green’ and ‘tractor’ Google will know exactly what the video is about.

Adding subtitles and transcripts is super easy.  1) Simply create a .TXT file that has the exact words spoken in the video.  2) Click on the “Edit captions/subtitles” button above your video.  3) Click on the “Add New Captions or Transcript” button. 4) Select “Transcript File” 5) Upload your .TXT file.

NOTE: We find it is better/easier  to select the “Transcript File” option rather than the “Caption File” option because the Caption File option requires that you also add exact time codes.  The “Transcript File” option only requires the actual words spoken during the video. Google’s speech recognition software will figure out when to add the subtitles to match your video.

We have created a quick tutorial video to help with adding subtitles and transcriptions to YouTube videos.  During our video, you will see  we add a transcript file to a recent tutorial video we have created to help businesses embed video in HTML on their website/blog using Youtube videos.  You can check out the original video How To Embed Video In HTML Using YouTube Videos and you can see a help page we created How To Embed Video

Add Subtitles & Transcripts To YouTube To Help With Video Search Engine Optimization 

Rewatchable is a video production company based near Boston, Massachusetts.