Summary: The latest on how to rank your videos internally on YouTube and externally within the Google Result Pages. (Got your own questions for the show? Ask 'em here!) A question from Ashle: YouTube results! Hey Ashle thanks for your succinct question! I’m not sure exactly what you wanted to know about “YouTube Results,” but I can give you guys a couple of tips on the ways Youtube has changed things recently. It also reflects back on how SEO has changed with Panda and Penguin. One of the things you’ll find with Youtube is that because its such a large authority site, it’s not influenced as negatively by Panda and Penguin factors. What that means for you is that you can still do some backlinking work to your Youtube videos and see a positive result from that. One of the great things about Youtube is that most people on Youtube are not well versed in the world of SEO and in the world of backlinking, so if you put in a little bit of time and effort into backlinking directly to your Youtube videos, you can often see an increase in your Youtube rankings internally within the Youtube search engine itself. You may or may not see an increase in your ranking in your Google results pages, it depends on the competition of the key phrase but again often you will see an increase in your Youtube internal ranking. Some of the other things that you can do to get your Youtube results more positive and get more action is using your keywords, obviously, in your title and your video descriptions, and your tags - thats old news and I’m sure that you know it but its worth saying anyway. The other big thing that changed in Youtube’s algorithm is that rankings are not necessarily solely determined by the relevance of videos anymore. Rankings are now determined by the engagement that your video creates. What Youtube wants us to do much like what Google themselves say that they wanna do to serve up the best results for the search term. So, Youtube has determined that if when you search for a video and you see those results and you click on result one, you only watch 5 seconds of it and then you click back. Youtube has determined that that video, when that happens a lot of time, doesn’t have the same engagement as a video where, say, somebody goes back into the results, they try video number two and they watched that one from beginning to the end. Youtube says, “Okay thats the video that when people type in this keyphrase, they’re looking for this kind of result.” If you have highly engaging videos that people will actually watch from the beginning to end, you’ll find that you will rise in Youtube rankings, and this is just the engagement. This is just where the internet as a whole is going, at least in Google’s eyes and at least what Google is trying to accomplish. Youtube is owned by Google so that's what we’re saying. You’ve got to have highly engaging videos that people were actually gonna be watching to get those top Youtube rankings results this days. So the old idea of the of kind of making robo videos that were read by computer and that just maybe read the script on the screen or something with a dictation program. Those aren’t going to be highly engaging. Those aren’t going to be the kind of videos that we will see lasting in the Youtube result pages any longer. You’ve got to actually be creating high quality content and that's something you’ll care about whether we are talking about video, whether we’re talking about podcasts, we’re talking about articles, thats just the way it is these days. I hope that helps you Ashle and see you on the next one!
