Earlier in April I have come up with the fun contest idea: having our users create screencast tutorials of their favorite MyBlogGuest features. With it, I've been aiming for the three main objectives:

• To get an insight into how our users interact with the site;
• To give newly-registered users more information on how they can benefit from the platform;
• (Most important here) To dominate Youtube "Related" videos results (to make sure those who watch our official feature tutorials are not distracted with videos they are offered to watch afterwards).

The participants were competing for video views (no other criteria such as likes, comments, etc were taken into account).

Before that our Youtube presence had been quite weak, so it turned out to be quite an insightful experience that I am laying out here for other Youtube newbies like me.

Dominating Search Results

There are three things I have understood about Youtube search:

1. Youtube search results are poorly personalized

I've been playing with the search results in several different browsers, both logged-in and logged-out. The worst (most irrelevant) results I got were in Safari where the browser was set to Russian.

In all other cases, there were a few slight fluctuations (with a few quite irrelevant results here and there) but all in all, the top 10 results were quite similar

2. Youtube search seems to be very dependent on on-page text surrounding the video

This text includes:

• Tags;
• Description;
• Title

If you try searching for a phrase, you are likely to notice that the top videos have the "exact match" of your search term somewhere in the text.

Let's try a few searches (searching when signed-out in the English-based browser):

[become a guest blogger]

[becoming a guest blogger]

[lean cuisine diet]

Note: The results were almost the same for [lean cuisine dieting] and ["lean cuisine diet"] (as exact match)

Conclusions:

• Youtube search favors exact match, so you'd better do your homework and work on tagging a lot
• Youtube doesn't know much about stemming but it does discount articles (a / the).

3. Youtube default search includes all available sorts of result types:

• Videos;
• Channels;
• Playlists.

Moreover, in many cases it seems to force channels in search results even if the relevancy seems to be not too high.

Here's an example: "Xfactor Xtra" channel is ranked #13 (which is still the first page of search results) for [become a guest blogger]. If you take a look at the channel it isn't really about "guest blogging" or even "blogging", but it does have a tiny mention of that in the description:

Conclusions:

• Don't forget to optimize your channel description for various key-phrase variations;
• Do create lots of topical playlists organizing your videos based on different criteria, like:
  • User reviews
  • Core features
  • Tutorials
  • Interviews
  • Featured users, etc.

"Interlinking" Videos for Better "Related" Search Results

Youtube claims to be using an intricate algorithm of determining which videos are "related". This algorithm is mostly based on common views and (lately) on audience retention.

While we have little to no control over which videos are shown as related to our own videos, we can do our best to lead our viewers "down the rabbit hole" to get them watch the videos which are related to our business:

1. Create Playlists

Playlists are great for both claiming one extra position in Youtube search results (as stated above) and walking the viewers through a few of our other videos.

The good thing about the playlist is that if you link to one video within the playlist, viewers won't be suggested watching "related videos" (which are often completely irrelevant to your brand). Instead, they will watch another video from the playlist in the queue.

What I did was creating one separate playlist for all entries and promoting it throughout the contest.

2. Create Video Comments

Youtube allows you to post video comments which are published after the video owner's approval.

Here's how I was making use of that feature:

Our contest rules were quite loose. Participants were not asked to voice-over their own videos or edit them in any way. So whenever the video seemed too long or needed some edits, I asked the permission to do that, uploaded the edited version to our official channel and posted it as a video response:

That resulted in many "common" views for both the videos.

3. Unique Tags

Back in 2007, using "unique" tags was quite enough to make all your videos appear in "Related" results. Nowadays, the algorithm is more complex, but the trick is still very effective in terms of ranking all your videos for your specific search term and thus getting more views in common.

Thus, for each video I was uploading, I made sure to add our brand name as a tag in all possible variations: [brandname], [brand name] and [brandname.com].

That had one very important outcome: Youtube search results for our brand name are dominated by us:

Bonus Tip: Make Sure Your Video Thumbnails Reflect Your Brand

This one is not about interlinking but it is important for earning some common views for your videos. Where possible, make sure your videos are easy to recognize and reflect your design or brand colors. This way your current users and followers are more likely to click on your thumbnail:

See:

The Results

We are still new to this and we have learned a lot (not all we learned has even been implemented so far for experimental purposes), but we have quite a few positive results:

• Our videos ranking for our brand name in Youtube search results? - Yes!
• Our videos ranking for our brand name in Google blended search results? - Yes!
• Our videos ranking for most important keywords in Youtube - Yes!
• Our videos ranking for most important keywords in Google blended search - Not yet
• All our videos have our brand-relevant "Related" videos - Not all but most of them do

Please share your one experience with Youtube search ranking! We still have a lot to learn!

Ann Smarty is the founder of My Blog Guest, the free community of guest bloggers who preach high-quality approach to guest posting.