SEO Help for My Channel

[SouthernIrish]

Hey guys,

For the most part, posting appropriate titles, descriptions, and tags in my videos have yielded relevant results in the "Suggestions" box on the right.

However, for a few of my videos, I'm noticing that the suggestions are not germane to my videos at all. Some of them are not even in the same category.

For example, my latest video:

There are plenty of League of Legends videos on YT with a subject focus on Cassiopeia, not to mention gameplay commentaries. The only thing that I can think of is that my original title was "Cassiopeia Eats a Teemo - League of Legends Gameplay/Commentary." Although, it's hard for me to believe that one word in the title is really enough to warrant videos of a Korean guy's eating a tangerine and a girl's eating habits. Maybe, I just don't understand how YT comes up with suggestions.

tl;dr
Could someone explain how YT makes recommendations in the "Suggestions" box?
Are my videos also being suggested for the videos that are being suggested for my videos?
Do the "Suggestions" make a huge impact on obtaining views?

Thanks folks.

 

[GamerKeebzy]

i think it depends on how the other person tags their videos as well, though i'm not entirely sure lol

 

[xandru8]

i dunno man even to some of my vlogs man it happned the same thing dunno why lol

 

[ViciousCritic]

Those are YouTube trade secrets. They don't want people to know the exact formula so people can't abuse it, but here's an decent guess based on observations.

Most likely, it's a combination of keywords from both the tag & description, along with category and recent user searches to determine which videos are most likely to be clicked. Previous activity from other viewers is most likely also is factored in, so that the most relevant and most clicked videos with the highest view times end up highest in the list. The current channel is obviously also a heavy factor, since I see your bird video along with your other videos even though the bird has nothing to do with gaming. Conversely, when I look at your bird video, I see several of your (unrelated) gaming videos in the list. If I click the "Load more suggestions" button at the bottom, I see mostly videos from popular channels, although they are barely related, so I assume that popularity is a greater factor than relevance. Also, it appears that channel popularity is as important as the individual video's view count. I also see "Clueso live in München (07/16) Chicago" on your bird video which only share the keyword Chicago, but both videos have this keyword in both the title and description, which adds greater weight to that keyword.

 

[xandru8]

waw ... when did youtube get so ... complicated ?

 

[SouthernIrish]

Those are YouTube trade secrets. They don't want people to know the exact formula so people can't abuse it, but here's an decent guess based on observations.

Most likely, it's a combination of keywords from both the tag & description, along with category and recent user searches to determine which videos are most likely to be clicked. Previous activity from other viewers is most likely also is factored in, so that the most relevant and most clicked videos with the highest view times end up highest in the list. The current channel is obviously also a heavy factor, since I see your bird video along with your other videos even though the bird has nothing to do with gaming. Conversely, when I look at your bird video, I see several of your (unrelated) gaming videos in the list. If I click the "Load more suggestions" button at the bottom, I see mostly videos from popular channels, although they are barely related, so I assume that popularity is a greater factor than relevance. Also, it appears that channel popularity is as important as the individual video's view count. I also see "Clueso live in München (07/16) Chicago" on your bird video which only share the keyword Chicago, but both videos have this keyword in both the title and description, which adds greater weight to that keyword.

Thanks for the response. I have a feeling that the title is also a very significant factor in YT's suggestions bar. My latest video was the only item with the word "eats" in it (and only in the title). The girl's eating habits video only has 34 views (from a year ago in a different category) but still show up on the first page for some odd reason. Now that I think about it, I remember uploading a video with the words "bear" and "death" in it. From a gameplay standpoint, it's a great video. However, it got very little exposure because the "relevant" videos were about bears, dying bears, death, etc. and in completely different categories (I wonder what the suggestions would be if I added "love" in the title).

Bleh. Anyways given that my channel isn't too popular, I'll stick to descriptive but only relevant words for titles, descriptions, and tags. If it is indeed the title, I should hope to see the suggestions change to something more relevant soon (unless the suggestions are based on the first title). It's sad that I can't be too creative with titles, though.

Sidenote: Do you think that the bird video is affecting my channel promotion?
Sidenote2: This just occurred to me...Could my username be affecting the suggestions by chance?

Edit: It does appear that the Suggestions box is largely based on the title. I recently changed the title of one of my videos from "Graves - Death by Bear Natcher - League of Legends Gameplay/Commentary" to "Legendary Graves - League of Legends Gameplay/Commentary." The suggestions are no longer about dying bears.

 

[VlogSalad]

I get related to all sorts lol
But I think you'll be related to videos with higher views if your own vid has higher views

 

[xandru8]

i heard as well that if you put some key words in the title tags and description and including the annotations thats the 4 ways to put alot of heavy w8 on a certain key words