So, how do you ensure that your video ranks highly? It’s pretty close to what you do to optimize web content (or a blog for that matter). Basic items they use:

• The title of your video
• The description of your video
• The tags that you assign to your video

By offering this basic advice, the post has attracted a great deal of comments by those asking questions or offering their own experience of YouTube optimization.

One particular comment stands out, together with Jeff’s response:

Chris says:
Hey Jeff thanks for the post.
I just checked your profile on Youtube and saw your videos that reviewed the Casio Exilim under the search term ‘Casio Exilim ex-z1080?.
I saw that you were kind of split testing the results.
And the newer version of the same video put up 1 month ago is ranking higher than the one that was put up 6 months ago - YET the 6month old video is actually rated 3 stars compared to the 1 month old video.
The only other difference is that the newer video has more comments than the older.
It’d be interesting in the test results.
1. Do newer videos get more preference than older?
2. Are videos ranked according to the number of comments?
3. Do the contents of the other videos in your profile (tags, titles and descriptions) as well as your profile name, play a role in the ranking of your video amongst others for the same/similar keyword?
It’d be interesting to find the test results. It could possibly be a combination of all of the above.
Maybe finding that out will help you put out your ooined term ‘YRO’ in the internet marketing realm. Anyway, thanks for the heads up.
Jeff Johnson says: Here are the answers to your questions:
1. No, newer videos do not necessarily rank higher than old ones. It has to do with many, many factors including incoming links, comments, tags, the number of sites that host it outside of youtube, the quality of those sites, etc.
2. Yes, commenting helps but is not the only thing that matters.
3. Yes, the only way the engines know what is in the video is by what you tell them is in it by use of your incoming link text, the title tags, your description, and any of the words found on the pages surrounding it.
That pretty much means you should optimize the pages that your videos on in the same way you would for a regular page.

I was interested to hear that the quantity and quality of external sites hosting the video plays a part in the ranking algorithm.

I don’t have any concrete evidence for this, but one thing that does appear to happen is that channels with a lot of content tend to outrank lesser channels (much like the way, as a vast generalization, Google favors sites with more content rather than less).

If anyone does have more definitive answers, please let me know.

Read the post from Underground Confessions

There are some real gems in this post such as:

readers really don’t “care how much you know until they know how much you care.”

and on top of that a great call for benevolence: why not spend some time helping new bloggers. Your reward will come. I’d suggest this all points towards one overarching principle which seems to underpin successful blogging: think of your writing more as community service rather than self-promotion.

Read more

According to comScore, blogs had 77 million unique visitors in the US for August 2008 - as opposed to Facebook, which only had an audience of 41million. I didn’t expect these figures to be quite so high. Another impressive figure is that 77% of active internet users read blogs. Quite impressive given that the medium has only been around for about the last 5 years.

There is a lot more information in the MediaPost research brief. Read more…

She gives a number of useful tips to get around this, particularly if you have an executive blog where visitors don’t feel confident posting. She makes the excellent point that best blogs are conversations and not monologues. Listen to your community and play an active role in it.

I’d suggest it’s also worth checking your web logs and looking at how many people visit the blog, and whether or not they are engaged enough to stick around and come back for more. Benchmarking these figures can be tricky, although if you have multiple blogs, you can compare them against each other.

Read Dierdre’s post on attracting more comments

In this post on the art of field study, you get an idea into what Google does in the realm of usability (they are not alone given that they have one of the most used interfaces on the planet - check out this early eye-tracking study).

They perform surveys:

It turns out that people are masters of saying one thing and doing another, particularly when it comes to nearly automatic behavior.

They undertake eye-tracking studies:

Notice how methodically the gaze moves from result title to title, occasionally inspecting the snippet text to gain more detail about the result.

And generally spend time with users getting to grips with what they do. The post is thoughtful in that it also considers some of the limitations of usability testing - particularly in the lab scenario.

One of the questions that springs to mind though is what exactly is the link between the usability team and the engineering guys? Just how much teeth do these usability testers have? I’m not advocating that they should have more control of the interface - after all, it’s refreshing that counting in web years, the Google interface has hardly changed in a millenium. The design just hasn’t swung with every whim of the crowd. We need some standards in this life.

Read more about Google’s usability studies

For instance, an About Us page is vital to give your blog some background and personality. A Contact Us page lets users get in touch, and adds a degree of transparency. The Update Page they suggest I find a bit more tricky to understand although they describe it as a place where you can get all ’salesy’. Having a page that lists all extensions, widgets and plugins is great to offer all the tchotchkes now on offer that spreads your message beyond the corner of your blog.

All great pages to add - although some of these features could just as easily live on your sidebar. Just remember to include them somewhere and give that blog some context.

Read full post

Spout argues in favor of the team approach, suggesting that this gives more touch-points into the company and a more rounded view of what’s happening. I’d say I largely agree with this. Of the six blogs we run here, by far the most successful have been those that have a team, rather than a single author, behind them. This could in part be due to these blogs generally producing more posts - and we do see correlation between posts and traffic.

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Listen to the interview