You Tube SEO
Pretty much every thing you do in You Tube makes a difference with your You Tube rankings. And the better you rank on You Tube, the better you rank on every search engine.
Let’s look at:
title
description
tags
views
ratings
playlist additions
flagging
embeds
shares
comments
age of video
channel views
subscribers
inbound links (links from outside of YouTube pointing to your videos).
Going Beyond Traditional Factors…
If you break it down, it actually makes complete sense that YouTube would take all of these factors into account when ranking videos. For example, what good is a video that has 400,000 views, but has been flagged several times and has no comments? Or, should YouTube rank a video highly that only has 10,000 views, but has been favorited 2000 times? How about a new video that hits YouTube? Should it rank over a video that’s been around for a year and has built up 125 inbound links? So on and so forth. I think these are great questions and deserve a good amount of analysis to determine how important each factor is when determining rankings.
Needless to say, this list of factors goes well beyond what most people think about when optimizing videos for YouTube. The list includes community factors that aren’t easy to build up and can take a lot of time. Engagement is key in social media, but that takes time, effort, and a solid understanding of each community. I think we all have seen “drive by” social media, right? People who jump into a community, post their latest work, and leave before you even know what happened. They get 1 vote (their own), have no friends in the community, and basically wasted their time. Based on what I just explained, I like the idea that all of the other factors impact rankings.
You should be rewarded for earning trust in a community, building a following, and providing valuable content that people cast votes for (via ratings, comments, and inbound links). It makes sense.
You should analyze your competition and try to match or exceed their statistics (based on the list above). I think that’s great advice and it requires you to think holistically about your YouTube strategy versus just focusing on views or tags or title…
It pushes you to think more about providing valuable content, connecting with others, and not just promoting your own videos. By the way, you can take that philosophy to every other social media community too.
So conduct your own testing. It takes time, but is well worth the effort.
Filed Under: You Tube
