YouTube Ranking Taking Hints from Social Media
I'm beginning to think that the search engines really love social media.
Why?
Because they are figuring out how to use the wisdom of the community to rank content that is really useful.
I just found this article over on ReelSEO on YouTube ranking that gives a nice summary of some ranking factors to look at if you're trying to your video to come to the top of YouTube search listings.
While I don't think SEO companies will be going out of business, it will take a bit more effort to fully take advantage of the social media aspect of search rankings going forward. That's because the folks who program the search algorithms are learning how to take what other people say about you and apply math to it.
So if people say bad things about you, or are not saying anything at all, the stuff you post will not have as much of a positive "push" has content that appears to be well-liked by more groups of people. The way I see it the way to "optimize" for social media is to have people create personas who interact with the rest of the community.
This would be fairly labor-intensive, and require real human beings to implement, so may not be a favorite tactic of SPO "masters", but I bet Google is quite happy with it.
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Comments on YouTube Ranking Taking Hints from Social Media
I think the key to ranking YouTube videos comes down to three main factors. These factors are building a unique title tag, description tag, and building external links.
Those definitely are the most likely factors to be included in ranking – and the easiest to manipulate.
External links/embedding is a little harder to game, but I know of people who hire teams of low-cost workers to create accounts on various free hosting sites and point links back to content they would like to rank well.
These don't count as much as links from more reputable/established sites, but when you have thousands of them they do have an influence.
Social promotion can be engineered similarly and in this case the higly reputable site is replaced with highly reputable individuals.
Of course, this is all theory anyway just built around observation since the search engines or video hosting sites aren't about to let us in to see how their algo works.
And that's a good thing.
It wouldn't be a good idea to built thousands of fake links to increase the number of external links. That technique is called link farming and its against Google's T.O.S. It is actually a pretty good way to get your URL banned if you get caught.
Link building aside, I would like to further discuss the option of self hosting video and some other related ideas.
LOL – You're absolutely right Ryan. The people I know of who do that use throwaway accounts and are looking for a short term boost. If they have businesses with long term goals, they don't use these kinds of methods with the accounts associated with those businesses.
I'll be happy to show you a couple of the self hosting methods I've used. I should do a tutorial on that.
Actually some people would find creating different personas and interacting with the community fun. However, practically speaking it would take away from the time needed to put into the business.
personally I think link farming is unethical. I don't understand how people can really go through with it.
This may indeed take some work. However, the task can be outsourced Many people in the digital point forum will "talk someone up" for just a few cents payment.