This tutorial will examine the important video ranking factors of YouTube for 2011, in the hopes of helping you achieve higher ranking in the YouTube search results.
YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/) has undergone some major changes in the last 6-9 months. They replaced their rating system from 1 to 5 stars to simply “like” and “dislike”. Also “favorites” seem to be prominent in YouTube videos but you can hardly see the number of favorites in the current implementation (except if you view video statistics). Also, you can now get a glimpse of a video's popularity using "video statistics". There are also some noticeable changes in the video ranking you can see when you do searches using the YouTube search box.
As of this moment, you may not have any new information regarding what factors are important in regards to YouTube video ranking. But you may be able to list the “candidate” factors and then do a more in-depth analysis. There might be more ranking factors to be examined and not included in the list below. For the sake of simplicity in the analysis, this study is limited to examining only the most common/easily measurable factors. These are the factors:
Relevance:
1.) Title tag relevance of the video – same concept as ranking for search engines. Title tag is the most important onsite optimization ranking factor. Let’s see if this holds true for YouTube search ranking.
User engagement factors:
2.) Number of Likes - more likes indicate high quality video content, though this can easily be manipulated. 3.) Percentage of Likes to Total Views – a ratio of the total number of likes to the total number of views. 4.) Number of Views – a simple measurement of video popularity.
Trust and Authority of Video Publisher/Creator
5.) Number of years since joining YouTube (for the video owner/publisher/creator) – the older the publisher on Youtube, typically the higher the reputation they have earned (though not always true). 6.) Total Channel Views for the publisher – a higher number of channel views indicates that the publisher is popular or has authority. 7.) Total number of subscribers – a better measurement of authority. A higher number of subscribers implies that the video creator is an authority and has good reputation.
Methodology and Data Gathering
Below are the keywords that will be used in this examination (similar to the old study):
a.) Tips to play piano b.) Guitar lessons c.) Laptop repair d.) PHP Developer e.) Mountain Climbing
The first step is data gathering. Each of those keywords will be entered into the Youtube search box and then the information of the Top 3 ranking videos will be gathered (number of likes, views, subscriber information, etc).
In addition, the top 3 bottom videos of those keywords will be gathered. The selected rankings are at position 152, 153 and 154.
Search Optimization 
