We spoke with Matt Liu, the YouTube Product Manager at Google who had some interesting things to say about the popular video site. He presented at the “Up Close with YouTube” session at SMX West, and shared a little more with us separately.

He talks about ways that content partners, advertisers, and every day users can take advantage of YouTube. He discussed optimizing titles, descriptions, and tags for videos, and mentions YouTube’s paid service.

YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine, so it stands to reason that rankings play a factor in YouTube just like they would with Google Search. Matt breaks it down into 2 main buckets:

Basic stuff like making sure your titles, descriptions, and tags are consistent, using complete sentences when appropriate, adding the location and date of your video, etc.

Analytics - Once you get some viewership on the video, use YouTube’s analytics tool YouTube Insight to see who’s watching your video. Are your views coming from a certain audience? A certain geography? Find the video’s hot spots. You can figure out search terms from the analytics data.

He then talks in more detail about YouTube Insight, which he compares to Google Analytics but specifically for video.