Cheezhead Recruiting News and Opinion

I surf a wide variety of job-related search queries regularly. Kind of sad, I know, but it is what it is. The other day, I came across a ranking for “Ohio jobs” that caught my eye.

The result was for a John McCain video on YouTube entitled “Ohio Jobs” (below). Considering all the job sites vying for exposure on such a keyphrase, it was intriguing that this video – which likely had zero ambition to rank for such a term – was indeed ranked. (It has since fallen out of the Top Ten, but may comeback.)

So how’d it happen? Here a few educated guesses.

1. YouTube is really trusted. By the simple fact that Google has a high level of trust in YouTube as a Web property means any content placed there has a nice head start vs. sites that are, well, not YouTube.
2. Title tag. There’s very little argument in the SEO community that a page’s title tag (the words at the top of your browser on the left) is the most important on-page element. That said, having “Ohio jobs” there helps nicely.
3. Header tag. If the title tag is No. 1, the page’s header tag is next in line from H1 on down. Check on this page – H1 tag is “Ohio Jobs.”
4. Metrics. To date, this video has nearly 20,000 views, 800 rankings, 400 comments and even one video response on it. It’s even been “favorited” almost 400 times. All these data points likely tell Google that this video content is fairly important and something it should serve up to users. And since Google owns YouTube, they have an inside track on such information
5. Embeds & Links. The quantity and quality of sites who embed a video into their own or link to it is likely the most important factor here. A quick search reveals this video has been added to the likes of high-powered properties such as USA Today, Hot Air.com and Politico.com.

Other things may have come into play, like how many times the video was shared via Facebook, for example, by YouTubers. Getting a link from a major Ohio newspaper never hurts either, particularly in terms of relevancy. And the question of how many pages linked to the linking pages and so on played a role.

You get the idea. There are also a few things that could be done to improve the current ranking. But we’ll maybe save that for another day for another video.

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