VSEO – Ranking Factors Behind YouTube
Guest Post By Ryan Sammy.
Everyone knows the importance of video marketing as well as the tremendous potential YouTube offers in creating a strong presence for your brand and company image. However, does everybody know how to use YouTube optimally to gain the desired advantage and leverage for your videos and thereby your company?
Just creating a good video of your company, or a video containing information intended for your target customers and uploading onto YouTube is not enough to get the desired results. There are many ranking factors behind YouTube that you should know if you want your video to score high marks in the popularity charts. Good VSEO takes into account these ranking factors to help build a good brand image and enhance the reputation of your company.
Apart from creating quality video content that information seekers will be willing to watch, there are other important factors that you can use to optimize your videos for YouTube and get higher rankings in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). The first and foremost is not to be just a passerby, but a player. Create a presence in the YouTube community for yourself. Listen to others and be heard. The rankings on YouTube depend on various factors, just as the factors behind organic search results on Google or any other search engine. YouTube in itself is a major search engine now, and it adheres to its own algorithmic parameters to decide rankings.
YouTube ranks videos that are watched most number of times rank very high on its SERPs. So you need to make videos that have a strong viral capability to bring in more viewers for your videos. The more people your videos can bring in to watch, the higher in rankings your video climbs. Now, this does not mean that by simply uploading a video that will be watched by many people can get you top spot in rankings; the videos have to be acceptable and engaging to make people vote for the videos. The more times your videos get viewer votes; the higher the chances of you getting top billings in the rankings! Another factor that could push your videos up is the number of times your videos are bookmarked for attention. These are the basic factors that can help your videos to get maximum visibility, and your attention when making videos should be to make them in such a way that they satisfy all the conditions stated above.
Having good titles, meta-descriptions, tags, comments, flagging, shares, comments, channel views, subscribers, inbound links, and latency do matter, but if you stick to the ground rules and include some, or all the above factors, there is no reason why your videos should lag behind. That said, being an active member of the community will help tremendously, and using video analytics such as “YouTube Insight” and “TubeMogul” should help make your videos better and to stay constantly updated on developments. Make good videos and stay engaged; that should drive you to the top spot very soon.
Read MoreWeb 2.0 Expo: Optimize Your Organic Search Results Leveraging Social Media & Blogging
Session Description: I’m all a Twitter ‘Cause your MySpace hurts my Facebook when I’m Linked-in – Learn how to leverage social media and your current website to DOMINATE search engine results and improve your organic rankings! Sponsored by Verio.
Industry expert and published author Heather Lutze gives you the rundown on her social media strategies from her new book, The Findability Formula. This breakout will give you actionable tactics you can implement immediately to get your website ranked higher in search engine results. Social media is HOT and delivers results if you know how to use them to their fullest potential. Learn how to use keywords effectively with Twitter, Linked-In, Youtube, Facebook, as well as your own company website to increase your search engine rankings. It is all about knowing and understanding the Findability Formula – and that is what you’ll learn in this workshop!
This session took place Thursday, April 2, 2009. The speaker:
- Heather Lutze, Lutze Consulting
Heather had a lot of great things to say; it was a shame that she didn’t have enough time to really go over it because of such a long pitch by Verio, the sponsor of the session. One thing Verio did that was annoying but I can’t really fault them for, was parking someone at the door and using the leads scanner to scan the name badges of the people coming in. Annoying, but since they were sponsoring the session, I can’t really fault them for it.
Bullet Point Review!
- Social media gives you a platform to position yourself as an expert in your field.
- Strategy:
- Connect with the right search keywords.
- Edit your social media profiles and elements with keywords.
- Track the results in Google search results.
- Know how users search:
- 15.2% are 1 word search phrases
- 31.9% are 2 word
- 27% are 3 word
- 14.8% are 4 word
- 6.5% are 5+ words
- The longer the keyword, the faster you’ll show up.
- Longer search terms are looking more to purchase, less informational or shopping.
- Resources: Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug and The Long Tail by Chris Anderson.
- Tool: Google External Keyword Tool
- Tool: Keyword Discovery
- Connect with the customer when they’re ready to take decisive action.
- Misspellings can rank highly (sometimes they convert higher).
- Look at the pages and be sure you actually want to show up amongst that company.
- Anything over 100 searches, long tail.
- Open tool, whats most targeted keyword, then write blog post (put the keyword at the front).
- Recommends All in One SEO Pack, ShareThis for WordPress.
- On LinkedIn, when you put your last name in put a dash and your keyword.
- Start on the long tail and work your way backward.
- Do it for your name, do it for misspellings, rank the whole page to push out the “sucks” terms.
Because of the 20 minute pitch for Verio at the beginning of the session, there was zero time for questions, which was a shame. I was hoping for some more real-world examples that weren’t just about Heather. There was time for one where a woman who is a voice-over talent was looking at it from her standpoint and Heather walked through the practical application, which was pretty cool.
Overall it was a good session once Verio was done talking, and I wish she’d shared her slides with the Web 2.0 Expo folks, but alas it’s not on their website.
Read MoreAffiliate Marketing Fanatics Episode 4: Listen to your Community
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Affiliate Marketing Fanatics – A Publisher (Mike Buechele) and an Affiliate Manager (Trisha Lyn Fawver) talk about all things Affiliate Marketing. From blogging to branding, social media to search, video and more!
This week we’re less all over the map, more focused on affiliate conferences, social media and communities, and once again our cherished shout outs. Of course our favorite topic of all time, Twitter, makes an appearance as they were in the news this week. The show comes in and just under 40 minutes for your listening pleasure.
- Social Media: Facebook caves into community pressure again, YouTube adds a Twitter Button
- Jermey Palmer uses surveys to make his affiliate marketing education products better.
- Twitter: Salesforce.com creates Twitter brand management service for companies and sells it for 1K/month, Twitter will have paid pro accounts
- Conferences: Jim Kukral organizing the monetization track for Blog World Expo Oct. 15-17, CJU dates announced Sept. 15-17, Big Omaha tech conference for midwesterners announced. Trisha will be attending Web 2.0 Expo and ad:tech SF next month.
- Shout outs: Sam Harrelson who called us Aff Marketing Maniacs, Brook Schaaf & Karen Garcia for their efforts with the Lobby Day against CA AB 178, Tim Robinson and shameless plug for Comic Book Fury
So please, go check it out and comment and let us know what you think!
Read MoreWhen a microblog stands in for a real blog…
Anyone who follows me on Twitter (if you don’t yet – what’s your excuse?) could see that I was more than making up for my lack of internet on my laptop by tweeting notes from the sessions I was in. I strained one of my fingers on my dominant right hand Sunday night bowling with the folks from GTO Management, and even taking traditional written notes was a challenge.
So before I kick off all the notes I took at the sessions (it was lighter this conference than I have in the past), here’s all the tidbits of knowledge I tweeted while attending sessions at Affiliate Summit West 09.
From the Buy.at Party at Moon:
- http://twitpic.com/11sw2 – Tear the roof off at Moon buy.at party
- http://twitpic.com/11t7v – From the roof of the palms
From The Ultimate Pitching Guide Session:
- @skydiver just said re pitches on twitter “if u can’t pitch in 140 char u need 2 work on brevity anyway”
- Twitter has replaced focus groups- @skydiver
From the ShareASale Under the Star’s 80’s themed party:
- http://twitpic.com/1243s – Jon levine @ sas party
- http://twitpic.com/124e8 – Gettin’ down at SAS party
From Affiliate Videos: Where do they work best? Session:
- Video session: Youtube is larger than Microsoft in search engines- 77mil uniques
- u don’t have to have a professional prod studio to develop video
- .tv traffic increasing but still nowhere near as high as .com
- very brand & vertical specific video creative is the most requested
- People buy from people – at the end of the day video is the most effective medium for that. Amen!
- I love @andrewwee for bringing up ShamWOW in his question!
- get out there & try it!
From the Pinnacle Awards Gala:
- Nice touch on the tux & beer @shawncollins
- Right on for Train Signals donating $10k for Breast Cancer Research- squish a boob save a life!
- Mike Allen – Affiliate of the Year
- AM of the yr- @djambazov Angel
- pinnacle award exceptional merchant CelebrateExpress.com
- pinnacle award Affiliate Mktg Advocate @mellies! Melanie Seery
- pinnacle award Best Blogger @jangro! Scott Jangro
- affiliate marketing legend – congrats to Kellie Stevens!
- congrats to thew winners!
From Advanced Optimization for Landing Pages Session:
- 2% avg conversion rate: 2009 year of conversion optimization
- test everything assume nothing
- Lisa Crossly Hunter: what are your affiliates doing that your search team can borrow from?
- start now, but don’t start without a plan. And test.
- gen rule of thumb- at least 100 conversions for at least a week (per element you change, I forgot to include that in the tweet)
From the Affiliate Triathalon:
- http://twitpic.com/12mj4 – #asw09 Brian Littleton of SAS @ Affiliate Triathalon
Of course if you’re REALLY bored you can just go to Twitter Search and enter in “#asw09 trishalyn” and see EVERYTHING I tweeted while at the conference 😀
Read MoreSocial Media Marketing Summit: James Lamberti
This should be interesting, as the topic is on the intersection of social media marketing and search. The speaker is:
- James Lamberti, Senior Vice President of Media and Technology, comScore.
Started with a comScore plug – that’s kind of a turn off for me personally. I’m the kind of person that is savvy enough to look you or your company up on Google if I didn’t know about you before and actually care to know more going forward. Seems like something a search guy would understand, right? I know that obviously people accept speaking engagements, in part, because it brings attention to their company, but to use it as a platform for a mini commercial is a faux paux – or at least should be – in the conference world.
I digress, overall it was informative if just a bit dry.
Bullet Point Review!
- In 1996, 2/3 of the world’s online population is in the US. Now it’s more spread out.
- Most commonly used internet categories include Search, Entertainment, and Retail.
- Social networking sites are exploding, so are multimedia sites such as YouTube.
- Community and Personals sites are seeing negative growth, likely a result of social networking sites replacing a large part of these sites’ functionality.
- America is slowest growing area given internet maturity, but there’s explosive growth internationally.
- 25.3% year-over-year increase in queries on search.
- Eyeballs -> Awareness, Consideration, Preference, Action, Loyalty -> Buy.
- Most consumers admit to being receptive to more leisurely products like music and entertainment being advertised on UGC sites than necessary items like financial services and utilities.
- MySpace monetization nearly 6x that of Facebook.
- Search is everywhere, not just on search engines but within the communities themselves, like YouTube, MySpace, Facebook.
- 2.5 billion queries within YouTube.
- 68% of web users never click on a display ad, and only 16% drive 80% of all clicks.
- Clickers are predominately younger with lower income.
- 90% of site visitation is view-through with no engagement.
- There are free tools lying all around the internet to help.
- 83% of the sales impact of Search is latent or offline.
- Brand advocates represent about 40% of online buyers.
- Advocates are very avid searchers – 104 queries vs. 72 for non-advocates per month.
- Hasn’t seen anyone really leverage search to create an advertising campaign or tie it to a social media strategy.
- Identify search query points-of-origin to determin optimal markets for print, TV, radio ads.
- Search intersects with EVERYTHING.
- Search is a logical and desired outcome.
- The value of search is almost always dramatically underestimated.
- A lot is being left on the table – too concerned with ROI metrics sometimes.
- Search is an under leveraged asset in the strategic and creative process.
Points brought up during the Q&A
Engagement mapping trying to measure touch points, undervalued. Shave money off your TV campaign and make sure your search is solid. There’s no more an expression of human interest than someone actively looking for your brand.- Ways to take this knowledge and make it actionable?
Last complaint, I swear! If you have a lot of interesting data points with numbers and facts, don’t skip through them in nanoseconds. There was a lot of interesting data presented, but no time to write it down. Jumping around slides is a bit awkward as well, but if you’re a data nut that wasn’t as concerned with writing things down as I was this was a valuable presentation to be sure. I enjoy sharing facts and percentages with others because they have more weight, but can’t share them when reviewed at 90 miles per hour.
Read MoreSocial Media Marketing Summit: Brand Spotlight on Cisco
This presentation focused mostly on Cisco’s launch of a new router ASR 2000, but they parlayed a singular product launch into an entire social media network for Cisco for uber users of networking tools that brought fun into the mix.
- LaSandra Brill, Manager, Web & Social Media Marketing, Cisco.
Wow… the computer she was using prompted her to restart now or later for automatic updates and she clicked Restart Now, so there was a hiccup in the program, so to speak. I have to give her props that she totally knew her presentation and continued on, even citing accurate figures, and just picked right back up. The entire audience groaning “ooh, noooooo” when she clicked Restart Now was amusing. But as I said, she held her own and recovered very well.
I saw an interesting tweet that someone came just for this presentation because they possibly have a less sexy product that this tweeter has! Good point – making a networking router exciting is quite the feat.
Bullet Point Review!
- Marketing in a web 2.0 world is much different than traditional marketing.
- Foundation of the campaign was the uber user – created a micro site to gather registrations for the launch event.
- Normally this happens a week or so ahead of time, but they instead used fictional characters to say something a bit more vague while being fun and interesting.
- Traditional campaign leveraged on a social media level. Used videos on YouTube, Facebook, etc.
- They created a Facebook group to leverage for this launch, but also didn’t want to make it toooo specific because they wanted to utilize it later.
- Group continues to grow even after the product launch.
- it is a long tail, but they feel that it’s worth it. They don’t pay for the sponsored group, but utilize the free group to minimize investment.
- Advertising is the tax you pay for being unremarkable.
- Created a game (Edge Quest) and used it with a tournament to create buzz in the blogosphere.
- Leveraged Second Life as well with a pre-event live concert, launch event countdown calculator.
- They did research before venturing into Second Life and found that they did have a big audience within SL.
- Created a video of the launch event on SL and posted that on YouTube and Facebook to leverage and cross publicize.
- Created a widget that became viral with an embed code for bloggers and social media. ProBlogger picked it up. Free advertising is awesome.
- Because the widget is hosted on their servers, they could update it whenever and it’s syndicated.
- Built up anticipation and speculation about the product to entice bloggers to write about them through teaser releases.
- Vaguness kept speculation fueled and buzz going.
- Leveraged the concept of a social media release – clear & simple, ensure accuracy, build community, easy access, attention-grabbing, embed code for sharing.
- Saved a ton of money by having a virtual product launch over an online only product launch. Only had to utilize John Chambers for an hour of his time instead of half a day.
- Reached 128 countries with a prerecorded launch video.
- Lessons learned:
- Avoid hidden costs – ensure roalty free access to videos so that content can be re-purposed on social media sites.
- Test, test, & more test – widget was a new tool so the embedding perfection took more time than anticipated.
- User generated content – the UGC on Facebook was the most active discussion with the “Top 20 Signs you’re an Internet Addict” thread.
- Edge Quest ASR Design Craft content was a bust – the promotion for this was lost in the promotion for the tournament itself. Lesson – stick to one message.
Points brought up during the LaSandra Brill Q&A
- Cisco has a big voice, so how does this translate to smaller business? You have to make it sexy, a router is very routine and they made it sexy – was in their top 5 product launches of all time.
- Most costs were soft costs – human time, engagement.
Overall a great session – at first I admit that I was worried it would be a snooze fest but it was actually really interesting to see how well they leveraged many different venues of social media to launch this product and the success they acheived with it.
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