Most Important YouTube SEO Factors 

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1) Title (exact match)

This is hands down the most important ranking factor in the youtube search engine. Videos with optimized title, tags and description that have 500 views uploaded from crappy channels can compete with poorly optimized videos that have over 2 million views.

2) Views

The number of views your video has is the second most important thing for youtube seo. Think of your youtube views as your main ranking power source and think of the video title as the main power navigator. With enough views your video can rank for any keyword.

 

3) Tags and Description selection (keyword density + semantic keywords use)

Think of these as additional ranking navigators. But ranking for the keywords that are only in the tags and description will only get a small percentage of the whole ranking power of the video. From what I have seen so far I think that description and tags only direct less than 10 percent of the total video power.

Another interesting thing I noticed at one point of this research was that if the title of a video response matched the keyword… the video gets some ranking boost. (almost identical videos, the one with the video response that matched the keyword was ranking higher even though it was 50-60k views shorter)

 

4) Age (old and extremely new)

Really old videos are given a nice ranking boost, especially for board terms like: “golf”, “parkour”… etc. However, extremely new videos are usually given a huge initial boost the first few days after they are launched. That’s why you can sometimes see a video with like 1000 views that ranks higher than videos with 10 million views. But for this to work, the video also needs to have a good title and description optimization.

 

5) Join Date

Users that joined a while ago are given more trust than the newer ones. However, I think that this only applies to ranking terms with less competition.

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So there you have it, the trick for good rank on youtube is good keyword selection (one that has less competition and a good amount of searches), video optimization for that keyword in the title, tags and description and then simply getting the views. If you continue pouring views in the video, it will eventually rank #1 for the targeted keyword. Then you can move on and create new videos for different keywords.