Youtube - My top Unanswered Search Questions

I'm a pretty big expert in online marketing and search marketing. I have ten years of practical experience and frequently attend sessions held by leading national experts. I consult with some of them.  Yet, there are some big questions about Youtube that nobody seems able to guide me on.

Youtube. Youtube is a huge search engine but I can't seem to find any info, even by original research, on how it works. My specific questions are in two categories. How does Youtube decide what video to suggest? And how does Youtube affect  Google's main search engine rankings?

 How does Youtube decide what video to suggest? 
1.  Which videos does it show in response to a search query?  How much is it like Facebook and does it tilt towards recently trending? How much does it operate like the traditional Google search engine and have a ranking that it mostly maintains?
2.   How does it categorize the content in videos? Does it rely on the keywords that we type in? The descriptions that the author puts in the "about"?  Or does it search it's own transcript of the audio content (as redacted by its own speech recognition software)? Does it look at other videos in the same playlists or by the same author?
3.  How does Google decide which videos to suggest at the end of a video? Does it look at other videos that might be in the same playlist?
4. What role does the number of started views and the number of completed views and the ratio of completed to started views play in these questions?
5.  Do links to a video increase the authority of a video's in its Youtube ranking? How about the number of times it is embedded?

Youtube as Content - What influence on the Google main search engine results? 
6.  What about the impact of outgoing links from Youtube? In the description section for a video on Youtube, there is a chance to link to another video or another site. Does Google count these links in ranking sites?
7.   If Google does count these links in the ranking, how does it grant authority to these links? Does it have to do with the number of views of the video?  Since the older the video, the more views, would it make sense for Google to weigh these links by views per month?

Google Search and local resources

Much of my business is selling online to homeschoolers and the number one term in our market is "homeschool". I've noticed something really interesting this past week.

When I search on Google from an account which I'm NOT logged into, I now find that 3/10 of the results on the front page are locally relevant.  Now here's the interesting part.

When I search from home (we use Comcast), Google provides three results which are specific to the state of Florida.  Local means the state level. For example:

Florida School Choice | Home Education
https://www.floridaschoolchoice.org/information/home_education/‎

When I search from the office (NO idea who our ISP  is), Google provides three results which are specific to my municipality.  Local means very tight, like my part of the county or my part of Fort Lauderdale. For example:

Calvary Chapel Ft. Lauderdale Homeschoolers

www.homeschool-life.com/fl/pompano/‎

Anybody else notice a correlation between the ISP and granularity of the local search results?

Do you think that it's a question of my ISP or just how my computer is cookied?

I suppose I should also compare browsers (I did both of these on Firefox which I only use for such tests) and how it works on my mobile devices.

BTW, here are several pages of info on homeschoolers and their curriculum:

http://www.time4learning.com/homeschool-online.htm

Starting to homeschool 

What Social Media Links does Google Count?

Google says that they rate sites based on whether other sites cite them as in, are there meaningful natural links.  I wondered how his applies to links on social media so I dug into Webmaster tools and found the following:

Youtube links - reported in Google's Webmaster tools. Not clear whether it's just in the original post or the comments too.

Facebook - Google apparently doesn't list them. It's been much reported that Facebook blocks the Google spiders.

Twitter - same as Facebook

Linkedin - I expected to find Linkedin reported but I did not. This is surprising to me and counter to what I've heard.  Anybody have any reaction?

Pinterest - Goolge reports these.

BTw, what you do you think of they way that our social media icons are working on Science4Us?  We have both the shares and the likes up.

• Force and Motion Lesson Plans
• 3D Location and Perspective - Student Lessons
• Motion Lesson Plans, Worksheets
• Science Physical Force Lessons for Elementary Students
• Magnets Lesson Plan for 1st Grade
• Simple Machines Elementary Lessons

This page is not in the webmaster tools as having links

It's weird. Google does not count the internal or external links to this page. I'm pretty sure that it has external links but to be extra sure, I'm placing one right here.

It's a link to a Grade by Grade Curriculum Overview .

Now this page has a link from our site map and a link from each of about 30 pages on our site which deal with scope and sequence. The page has been up for about three months. Yet Google webmaster tools do NOT show any internal or external links to this page.

Why? Is it too short of content? That's my guess. But my previous research on why pages languish in the supplementary index do not support that.




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Anchor text basics

There are a lot of web literate people who don't understand the basics of anchor text. Here's a primer taken from an email that I wrote to a forum moderator:

A post on autism was answered like this:

Welcome! Here is a link you might be interested in.
This answer is fine for people. But to help the search engines better “understand” the page that you are pointing to, you should write it like this:

Welcome! Time4Learning has a page on educating children with autism that you might be interested in.

The words that are hyper linked are called “anchor text”. Google takes anchor text very seriously. They use it to categorize pages. (Yahoo & MSN take the anchor text less seriously).

For a funny demonstration of this, google “here”. Number one on a google search for "here" is Adobe’s download page for acrobat because almost every website has the same line on it somewhere:

“click here to download adobe acrobat”

So if you are looking for "here", google thinks you want some adobe acrobat. And it is the world's best search engine! :->





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Search Engine Relationships

People will do the most amazing things for links. Here is one of the most interesting linkbaits that I've seen: An interactive chart showing the relationship between the search engines over time!

You can see who is using whose search results and advertising at what point in history.

It's very cool. I'm pleased to reference this useless intriguing amusing gadget. It does make the point that there are only a few sources of search engine results and not that many more sources of context sensitive advertising.

See it for yourself. Now! Free! The amazing Search Engine Relationship Chart!


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The SEO Process

I found a great series of articles on the SEO process that I'll share with my staff to give them an overview of what we do, day in and day out.

It's a ten part series of articles run by WebProNews. Below is the table of contents from article 6.

1. Keyword Research & Selection
2. Competitor Analysis
   
3. Site Structure
4. Content Optimization
5. Link Building
6. Social Media
   
7. PPC
   
8. Statistics Analysis
   
9. Conversion Optimization
   
10. Keeping It Up

BTW - I wouldn't organize the topics this way. I would have an article on "on-page" issues which, perhaps, is what content optimization is actually about. Stay tuned while I read these articles...



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SEO Blogs & Info

I'm trying to upgrade my reading. I've spent too much time with the nonsense on a bunch of forums that I've been reading. I'm trying to spend more quality time on my SEO reading. Here's my new batch:

1. Matt Cutts Blog. Google controls all and knows all, Matt shows that they are they are a benign force for good. What a great face for google. And I bet he tells our story inside pretty well too.

2. SEOmoz blog. One of the best. Not the most fun. Some interesting riffs. No research. sigh.

3. Funny British SEO lasses. Its weird how much more fun it is to read when they have a little attitude and great looks. Plus, I love the accents.

4. I'm following the marketing experiments webinars and emails (actually, Kris is). Very educationally done. I heard them talk a few years ago and it was a formative experience for me.

Thats maybe enough for this year....

Learning to Optmize Search Engine Terms - Using Power Words

When learning to optimize our Vocabulary Games site for search engines we have found that some terms are much more powerful than others. "Power Words" for instance seems to be an important term which isn't immediately obvious when delving into the world of Vocabulary, but makes sense once you know about it!

We've found that we're not gaining any traffic on terms like Vocabulary Software, although it is a powerful concept in Googleland. Is it important to know what we aren't as much as it is to know what we are? We don't rank on the term "fruit baskets" either. What does this tell us? Hmmmm

SEO Abbreviations Glossary

404 - page not found. Most sites redirect the user to a standard page when the requested page does not exist
504 - aredirect from one page to another (when the first page is obsoleted)
B2B - business to business
B2C - business to consumers
BOT - short for robot (an automated self-running process)
BLOG - short for weblog, also suggests a Better Listing On Google (Joke)
BTF - below the fold
CPA - cost per action
CPC - cost per click, or, cost per customer (a source of ongoing confusion)
CPM - cost per thousand views, a rate used for advertising and banner sales
CTR - click thru rate
CSV - common separated values, a data format often used for transport between systems
FAQs - frequently asked questions
FFA - free for all meaning anyone can add a link.
DMOZ - Directory MOZilla, the open directory project, a human edited directory that was a big deal in the 90s
DNS - domain naming service, the lookup system of table coorelating names (such as www.spellingcity.com with numerical IP addresses
GUI - graphical user interface
HTTP - hypertext transfer protocol, meaning the info to come is in HTML
HTTPS - secure/encrypted HTTP
HTML - the code used to write web pages - hypertext markup language
IBL - inbound links
IM - instant messaging
IP - Internet Protocol, usually used as short for "IP Address", each computer and router on the net has a unique numerical address such as 192.117.80
IT - information technology meaning computers and such
JPEG - an image format, joint photographers expert group
LTV - liftetime value of a customer
OBL - outbound links
PFI - pay for inclusion
PPC - pay per click
PR - Google PageRank (named for Larry Page punning on his name)
ROI - return on investment
SEM - search engine marketing
SE - search engine
SEO - search engine optimization
SERP - search engine results page
SQL - standard query language, an architecture/protocol common to modern databases
UI - user interface
URL - web address
WWW - world wide web, a great moniker to help people understand the internet. I wonder who coined the expression?
XML - eXtensible Markup Language, a new language augmenting HTML for better organizing data and meaning

Top Ten Factors Affecting Your Search Engine Position

Here are the top ten ways to improve your position in the search engines.
They are in order of Most Important to Least Important! (in my opinion)

1. Quality inbound links from relevant pages with relevant anchor text to relevant pages.
2. Quality Inbound Relevent Links
3. Original content with each page built around a few targetted keyphrases with correct use of page title and URL.
4. Keyphrase-based domain name
5. Quality Directory Listings
6. Large Websites
7. Quality Relevent Outbound links
8. Site map
9. Correct use of H1, H2, Meta, and Alt tags
10. Correct use of keyword density & metatags (important to Yahoo & MSN)

Insignificant:
Quality HTML with no errors
No broken internal links
Having friends at Google.

What will hurt you:
All and any blackhat techniques
Spam
Lots of non-original content
Links to spam & trash sites

Online Revenue Development

Time4Learning has a fantastic online learning service for afterschool or homeschooling which we provide to users for a monthly fee. So the heart of our business is a subscription service.

However, with over 400,000 visitors per month, we have often considered trying to build revenues though either advertising or affiliate programs.

To be clear, we are NOT talking about advertising to our students or members. We don't do that. We are thinking about our main and tertiary sites where we get lots of traffic but most of which does not convert into members. In fact, 99% of our visitors don't sign up so it seems reasonable to try to make some money on them as they surf out of our site.

Adsense - We have had a variety of different experiences with adsense, some of which we cannot explain. At one point, we made alot of money on it but then, some clever consultants, convinced me to take it down.

Since then, I've run adsense on sidebars of some pages of the site and at best, I can around a 5% clickthru on the ads. With an average of $.10 / click, this means that I make a dime on one out of every twenty visitors or, a half penny per visitor. Here's a question: anybody out there want to share similiar metrics with me? Are there industry norms of what one ought to be able to make per visitor?

I've also experimented with a variety of affiliate programs including commission junction, linkshare, affiliate fuel, amazon, and others. None of them have done much for me. Or, I've not figured out how to do much with them?

If any of you have experience helping to optimize pages for these efforts and wants to help, I'd be pleased for advice or even some consulting help.

Homeschool Education - Googles rankings

Homeschool Curriculum #1
Homeschooling curriculum #8
homeschool #7
home school #17
homeschooling #18

home education - not in top 100 (overture reports 6057 terms)...interesting. My poor position here is interesting since this is part of the title of my home page, the most linked to page on my site and a PR 6. I wonder if this one link will make a difference?

Whats the difference between a "SEO Consultant" and

Whats the difference between a "SEO Consultant" and a used car salesman? Answer: The used car salesman knows when he's lying. First, let me apologize to those of you have have taken offense at that seo joke. Many used car salesman have been calling to complain ..... (be da ding!) Yes, that second seo joke was bad. Sadly, the seo industry includes many bad jokes.... (be da ding! be da ding!) Seriously folks, I've receive alot of calls from SEO sales people and frankly, it would be hard to find a more-misguided group of people. And it's not that they mean to lie, its' just that they "get confused" and carried away and don't seem to really understand much. My impression is that many of them were part of a SEO effort that resulted in some site coming out number one on some search engine for some keyphrase at some time. At the time, they might have just been the secretary at the advertising agency that worked with the client. But, in the course of time, these details got lost. Through the course of exxageration and confusion, they lost track of what their actual role was and what was actually accomplished. Many of them are now boasting: "My last client used this technique and got to number 1 in 3 days!!!!" When they explain to me what they are planning to do, it seems to me to be very unlikely. And now, they are "SEO Consultants" (salepeople) peddling long term contracts with monthly payments. They act like that they really do know how to do SEO cost-effectively, that they really can take any site and make it do well in all the search engines, and that we should be gratified that they "prepared a customer analysis for you for free" (ie ran a few keyphrases thru some sort of analysis). Then, this is a true recent story, I found myself at a lunch with the firm president (saleguy) pushing for a signature on a contract for $5,000 month with no cancellation clause and no "level of effort" commitment or reporting by the contractor?" If you think I'm exaggerating, I'll show you such a contract. The SEO company that I was meeting with was the one pushed by a hosting firm(Webstream) at that time and they were promoting them on the phone and across their site. The company pushed the contract to me repeatedly and really expected me to sign. yick.... ***** In reality, there are really only two people who actually understand how the search engines work. Of course, they disagree....(yes, thats part of the show....) ******* My directory of SEO Jokes, Jokes about SEO, and Jokes about Search Engine Optimizers (OK. That one was a subtle. Did you miss the keyphrase threepeat? Are you paying attention?) Here's a few that I've found from around the web...with bylines and links.... www.stuntdubl.com/2006/03/24/seos-and-lawyers-its-a-joke/ including: - SEOs are safe from the threat of automation taking over their professions. No one would build a robot to do nothing. - If it weren’t for SEOs, we wouldn’t need them. - Talk is cheap…until SEOs get involved. ba ba bing... they just keep coming... Do you know an SEO's definition of SPAM? (thanks to http://www.webnauts.net/) S = SITES P = PLACED A = ABOVE M = MINE sad - this seo joke made me laugh out loud - from http://www.threadwatch.org/node/7134 SEO Anonymous Meeting Hi, My name is Michael and in the past 5 years the longest I've gone without checking stats or email messages is 3 days ..