Getting videos watched on YouTube

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One of the questions I field regularly is how to improve the visibility of videos on YouTube. The answer is quite simple: start with highly sought after content. It’s not as hard as you think and the secret ingredients are in your web browser’s search history. People generally want two types of videos: entertainment and informational. Everything else is crap and won’t rack up many views. For the purposes of this post, I’m going to ignore entertainment videos. These are music videos, funny home videos, clips from mainstream entertainment and of course, cats. So let’s focus on the other category – informational.

People go to search engines typically looking for answers to their questions. So, make sure your videos provide those answers. How-to videos, informational snippets and overviews of processes all do well. For example, “how to fix a leaky toilet”, “how to test your smoke detector”, “how to solve a square root”, “how to remove wallpaper”, “how to fry an egg”. Get it yet? This is what people want. It’s what people search for. If you have a video like this, when people search, they’ll see a big icon for the video, and be immediately drawn to it. Search engines love videos, because searchers click the videos. As a result, they tend to rank highly and they get more clicks. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy which is the search paradox I’m always discussing.

At American Public University, we took very expensive, Hollywood-style production videos and placed them on YouTube. Sure, some of our prospective students watched them. And they are great videos. They were expensive videos. So they have a few thousand views after a year. We then took some low budget, crudely produced videos on how to solve the most common K-12 math problems like polynomial equations, sine/cosine, adding fractions, etc. These took a few minutes each to produce and cost basically nothing. In the past three years since adding the videos to YouTube, iTunesU, and our site, www.CampusMath.com, we’ve had nearly 2,000,000 views of the series. Why? It’s what people want! It’s what students are searching for.

Give people what they want.

Also important is the proper naming, tagging and description of a video. That will help the search engines connect searchers with the videos. It’s easy. Create a short title – about 40 characters or so. Make sure you have a dominate identifying keyword. Then, create a description, no more than about 250 characters. Include more keywords that identify your content. That’s really it. Here’s a good article that goes into more depth with regards to ensuring discoverability of your content.

We’ll leave another important topic to cover on another day – marketing your videos if you are a small business. I have some more tips on that later…

Google’s auto complete, a self-fulfilling prophecy?

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Google’s auto complete feature suggests the search words/phrases that most commonly match what you are typing in real time.

For example, if nearly everyone typing “and” end up typing “android”, Google will suggest that through it’s auto complete feature, designed to save you time. It’s also designed to “help” your searching by showing you what the majority of other people typing similar phrases selected.

From Google’s help site:

As you type, autocomplete predicts and displays queries to choose from. The search queries that you see as part of autocomplete are a reflection of the search activity of all web users and the content of web pages indexed by Google. If you’re signed in to your Google Account and have Web History enabled, you might also see search queries from relevant searches that you’ve done in the past. In addition, Google+ profiles can sometimes appear in autocomplete when you search for a person’s name. Apart from the Google+ profiles that may appear, all of the predicted queries that are shown in the drop-down list have been typed previously by Google users or appear on the web.
 
For certain queries, Google will show separate predictions for just the last few words. Below the word that you’re typing in the search box, you’ll see a smaller drop-down list containing predictions based only on the last words of your query. While each prediction shown in the drop-down list has been typed before by Google users or appears on the web, the combination of your primary text along with the completion may be unique.

But does this really benefit users? Sure, it’s a time saver, but it may also steer people away from less common phrases that may in fact be more accurate.

Google Auto Complete

Source: Google — Sample of auto complete feature for “new…”

Why does that matter?

As more people use auto complete and select the most common results for the suggested phrase, the more Google will continue to show those suggested results, further pushing down the less popular results.

Showing more popular results is part of nearly all search engine algorithms, but if you consistently steer users towards one option over another, that other option will be artificially increased in affinity/popularity.

This could be really bad for a business. Let’s say someone searches for a company and they want to read about negative reviews/scams. So they search for the company’s name + scams. If a few more people do it, it may get picked up by the auto complete algorithm.This means every time someone searches for the company’s name moving forward, “scams” will be suggested until enough people stop clicking that phrase to tell Google otherwise. Wouldn’t a user who otherwise was not looking to read scams be somewhat intrigued to click that suggested term, even if that’s not their original intent? And every click reinforces “scam” as a suggested term. It then becomes harder and harder for a business to reverse this – even if there are no scams or negative reviews to begin with.

This is very similar to the term “google bombing“. Where users can potentially “game” Google’s search algorithm. Albeit, the good folks at Google are always working on improving the algorithm to reduce this, it can still happen.

Don’t get me wrong – I love Google. But, I’d love to see some studies on the psychological and socioeconomic impacts of suggesting terms.

Do not reply to this email (is bad for business)

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I want you to start thinking about your email messaging differently moving forward.

Do not send a message if you don’t want to accept replies from your [customers/clients/readers].

Why? Well, unless you have a really darn good reason that you don’t want to hear from people, messaging and engaging your email recipients should be a two way street. And yes, I’m even talking about special offers, weekly discount newsletters, and so on. Don’t send an email if you don’t want a reply.

We live in an increasingly connected world that is held together loosely by the connections we make with businesses and customers. Enabling those connections to flow freely and enabling conversations will help your business understand problems before they get too big among a myriad of other benefits.

You should want to hear from the people that keep you in business. Give them an opportunity to reply to your message, even if it’s a simple receipt. Don’t turn them away.

I’m not saying you have to reply to everyone, either. This is important to note. Set up an auto-reply that let’s people know you received their message, it will be reviewed, not all messages will be returned, etc… Figure out what works best for your business.

Here’s a great article for further reading on the subject: http://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/1695743/do-not-reply-this-email

Malware still infiltrating major search engines

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I find it challenging to understand why there’s still seemingly minimal innovation in the area of protecting searchers from malware infected websites. This seems to be a no-brainer from my perspective: protect your customers, and they will continue to come back. But I think the problem stems from customer naivety – they don’t know what they clicked will hurt them, and that they were infected because of a link they clicked on from the search results.

The major search engines need to better partner with security companies to protect their customers – and ultimately their revenue source. A simple pre-filter could stop many infiltrations of malware and protect the net.

Read more here about how the latest studies show the major engines failing in this area: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/197972/bing-google-ad-seriously-impacted-by-malware.html