youTube Video-Seo: Ranking Factors
YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world. What factors play a role in order to be listed in the top results of the youTube search? Nowadays it is no longer sufficient to represent these factors only as a list. It is not enough to write the keyword in the video-title, description and keywords. The youTube algorithm evaluates many more signals. And all of the individual factors are related to each other. The following infographic gives an idea of what is important.
Infographic of youTube Ranking Factors
First of all the image. Please find below some hints…
Video-Seo: youTube Ranking Factors infographic (by Martin Missfeldt)
Please feel free to share this graphic. If you like to print it out – here is a larger version: Download youTube Ranking Factors infographic (Jpeg, 1280 x 1988 px, 800 kb)
I have devided the grafic in four zones:
- youTube-Channel / Trust & Authority
- onVideo / Relevance
- Views / User Reactions
- Recommendations / Sharing
Some hints about…
youTube-Channel
- Frequency -> How often logged in, how many actions (ratings and comments on other videos, comment answers etc), how many new video uploads …
- Trust -> Age of channel, number of subscriber, count of channel views, total views (all uploaded videos), connected Google+ profile (!), perhaps adsense (?)
- Authority -> Channel title, channel keywords and description, link to homepage, related channels, playlists (for each: title, keywords, description)
onVideo
- Keyword relevance -> Video title (video upload filename), keywords and description ( including outgoing links to relevant sites), annotations, video transcript.
- Freshness may be a ranking factor, not sure abou this
- HD quality (of course)
- Attractive Thumbnail -> usually you can’t incluence that (be sure to choose the best out of three), importent because the clickrate in listes (search results or „more videos“ on the right of a youTube-video-page)
User action
- Very important: number of views
- Audience retention -> Absolute (depends on video length) and relative (compared to other videos with the same length)
- Reactions -> Nunber of comments (keywords in comments?), Comment reactions (discussion = good!), Number of Thumbs up, Thumbs up / down ratio, number of favourites, video responses, Number of playlist-addings
Recommendations / Sharing
- Social Media sharing -> eg. facebook, twitter, google+ (!), and other popular services. Power of each signal depends on the „profile-strength“ of the sharing person
- Embeddings -> number and strength of sites, that embedded this video
- Extanal link to the youTube video-page (not sure about that in order of the youTube ranking)
Conclusion
See the arrows at the borders. It all beginns with a youTube channel. The stronger the channel the better the chance to rank high in the youTube search. Optimize the video relevance for each uploaded video. You should be honest and correct, otherwise it will have a high bounce-rate. Use social-media to share the video – and hope that other will do so too. Allways answer on comments and make it easy for people to give the video a thumb-up. The more views, the more reactions, the more sharing, the better. The video channels gets stronger by this. Good for the seaqrch ranking – and for new videos.
Optimizing videos is a long term strategy – and it depends on quantaty of signals (Views, Likes, Comments, Embeddings etc)
Any suggestions? What have I forgotten. Please comment :-)
Hope it helps.
[German version of this infographic]
Read more about …
- Google: official informations about youTube analytics
- ReelSeo: YouTube SEO – Ranking Factors – Beyond Views, Titles, and Tags (2009)
- SearchEngineLand: The Key To Top Video Rankings On YouTube & Google (2010)
- VideoCommerce: 9 YouTube video SEO Tips and tricks for better ranking
- The slides of my presentation of the SEMSEO 2012: Video-Seo (Google Doodle Case Study) – german, but perhaps you could read the images ;-)
More infographics
Google Ranking Factors
Google Images Ranking Factors
Category: youTube | Author: Martin Missfeldt 36 Kommentare
Its not my first time to pay a quick visit this site, i am browsing this website
dailly and get good information from here everyday.
Hi,
I would like to make an updated Hungarian version of this Infographic. It’s a really good one and I would be happy to make it. Naturally it will gives you a link to the original content.
Is it possible to get the source of this infographic?
Thanks for the reply!
All the best,
Daniel
Notre objectif n’est pas de vous proposer des centaines des projets, ni de vous harceler au téléphone pour vous „fourguer“ absolument quelque chose, pour vous faire partager notre passion de ce magnifique pays.
Great Info here….LOVE THE CHART! I just found a Video rank checker software that you may find useful hopefully :)
Thanks for the post.
I really like your infographic. Its very creative
This is some very useful information and the ranking factor map also helps greatly.
What a tasty infographic. I mostly agree with the factors explored on this, although I’m definitely interested in seeing how to increase the channel’s authority levels as opposed to a single video
Thanks some really helpful tips great info
Martin, that is one of the nicest Info-graphics I have seen so far….and being targeted at YouTube makes it even more fantastic…great work!
You have pretty much covered every possible angle and area, as far as the various factors that seem to be helping Channels and Videos ranking….
As of now, 2015, YouTube seems to be placing a lot of emphasis on visitor / user engagement, time watched, percentage watched…as well as social factors….
Though, to be honest, ultra large Authority channels can rank a fresh upload, up on top of page one(in their niche) and they could do it standing on their heads with their eyes closed….and they do NOT need to do any SEO….(have seen plenty of channels do this, and they throw all the rules „do this and do that to rank well“ right out the window…
Not quite so easy for small to average YouTube channels, though! For other You Tuber’s it’s back to the grindstone!