YouTube Ranking - Get Electric

Here's a quick thought, that I had...

So, we all know that ranking YouTube videos at the top or near the top can be a serious money maker. We all also know the basic strategies. Here's a thin version of what I'm talking about...

Proper file name, keyworded article, site with keyword link, annotation with keyword at least 3 times, tag with our main competitors name in it, keyword 4 times in the caption, keyword channel name, backlinks, link in your channel, paying people to post your video to your wall, press release, paying for views and engagement, yada yada yada...That's just some.

I mainly use YouTube for local marketing. Everyone wants to rank #1 for outrageous keywords with insane competition and their approach to the marketing aspect tends to be similar to their approach to a low competition keyword. In general they do what they've been doing just on a much bigger scale, but that logic is broken. About 2 years ago I spent over $4,000 trying to rank a video in the health industry and guess what happened? Nothing, I climbed to page 2 at the bottom and when I stopped optimizing soon after I dropped 5 pages. Why? It's because those videos that are there were not fabricated. Oh and for those who were wondering, age of the video has absolutely nothing to do with ranking power RETENTION is key.

But can a person really duplicate RETENTION? Can a person really make YouTube think that their video is being shared and watched? Is that really what is needed? Here's something interesting.

Retention's Definition -
The capacity to remember

See what happens is when our videos are watched, pinged embedded, shared; what 's happening is it's reminding the search bots that this video is "compelling" (initially, which just means the bounce rate is low), which reports to the "algorithm". The consistency of this happening is very important but how can we fabricate this? It seems like we'd have to get genuine visitors. When our video gets crawled that information goes straight to the algorithm like a water hose and the more good ranking data it can siphon from your video at once the better you'll rank (speed to market place). Think of it like a pond and if that bot comes to that pond over and over you need to have something valuable for it to drink EVERY TIME. This drink (information) goes straight to the belly of the beast... ugh... algorithm.

I've been working on something called the "YouTube Engage Project" and if you've read any of my past posts then, you all know, I'm all about finding new ways to approach they typical problem. I think I may have figured it out. My theory has worked 8 out of 10 times.

Tell me, what do you guys think are the absolute biggest factors in ranking videos?

How many views it has? (I've seen videos with 8,000 views getting out ranked by a video with 9 views)

How engaging is it? (Like a website the bounce rate is partially responsible for this, so if your video is 9 minutes long of just an arrow on the page and people don't leave, then you have good engagement).

Being content specific? (As above so is below, if you have a video called make money online and it's an hour long about something totally different YouTube doesn't care). Spiders and algorithm are not human. Besides, they can't see what's in the video (they are calculations... 101101000, 1000101001); it'll be especially tricky if it's captioned. As long as visitors aren't bouncing then they figure it must be "relative" good content.

(ps. Google does not care about your meta tags on your websites) Need proof...? Well surely you can have it Google doesn't use the keywords meta tag in web search

YouTube makes money from ads so trust me, they do not care what your video is about, if they assume it's of value to keep people watching then well, that's all that matters. They (the calculated algorithm's) care what the world thinks of your video; the better the world accepts your video and "shares it" the more people you bring in, the more money they make).

Think about this... A song or a movie can come out tomorrow and be called "Make Money Online" and within a month it will surely without a shadow of a doubt topple the search engines while being totally irrelevant to making money online... What does this tells us? Simply, engagement (which has few properties) is the 90% weight of ranking.

All of these are properties of optimization.

File Name? (How important is this and at what weight?)

Citations? (What are they and can they really be a ranking factor like they are used to help rank websites and google places?)

Linking? (sometimes much like websites, external linking is just a hole in your boat, so some may ask why would a person do it if the website you're linking to isn't plugging that hole up by reciprocating? Which is better, internal linking to my channel or video or external linking to bigger sites?)

Trending? (Does your video rank better if it's something currently related to what's trending)?

Virality? (Does going viral really help my ranking in the long run? If so how can this be profitable as most viral videos are not keyworded? What defines virality? Is there a certain number that needs to be reached, shares, likes? And how can I make ANY VIDEO become viral?

Subscribers? (If I am getting constant subscribers does this mean my channel has more authority? and does that authority mean that I can rank easier? If so for what keywords? Keywords related to my niche or any?

Tags? (does someone else having my YouTube channel name in their tag help me and if so is that a type of YouTube citation (aka sort of a backlink?)

How helpful is it to do these things or could there be just one simple way to rank that no one is talking about?

I'd love to hear some feedback.

Daniel Brown

Questions are in a rhetorical fashion.