I posted this in a thread buy nobody's replying:
So I (really someone in my family) have a video that ranks 12th for the main keyword. The video is a remix of a well played radio song so for demonstration let's just say the video is called Wiz Khalifa - Black And Yellow (Official DJNAME Remix) - Free Download. Here the main keyword would be Black and yellow. Contrary to what seems like common sense to me, the video ranks higher for the search "black and yellow" than for the search "black and yellow remix" even though there's more videos with more views for the main keyword than for the remix video (I assumed we'd easily make the first position because our video already has the most views of any remix). 1) Shouldn't the more specified search make it rank higher?
I have some general questions as well. 2) Does the order I put the keywords in for the video affect how youtube ranks the video for each keyword? Also, 3) what changes to the video cause a penalty in the search rank? Early in the video's life the keywords looked something like:
DJNAME
RAPPERNAME
Wiz Khalifa
Black and yellow
black and yellow remix
Wiz khalifa snoop dogg t pain
free wiz khalifa downloads //what do you think about keywords like this as an aside
wiz khalifa free mp3 downloads
I figured nobody was searching for DJNAME or RAPPERNAME so we moved the main keyword to the top. What followed was a complete drop off from the search rank for the main keyword. (eg. it wasn't ranked in the first 25 pages and I assume it wasn't ranked at all). The other keywords stayed.
Also, 4) does having an excess of keywords detract from the "power" or "effectiveness" of the main keyword? Our video ranks at 12th for the hypothetical main keyword black and yellow, has 119k views in a week ~200 likes ~20 dislikes, a description full of the main keyword, etc.. Another video with 6k views in 2 weeks, ~130 likes, 4 dislikes, 1 reference to the main keyword in the description, and in the same category (music) ranks 9th. Our video is getting 5-6k natural views a day and this isn't getting anything near that. So the only thing I can think is that our video has dumb keywords like "Wiz khalifa snoop dogg t pain" that are detracting from the main keyword or that the like ratio from likes to dislikes really matters in the rankings and that I should boost the likes on my video a lot or hit the dislike button on their video a lot (although this seems cruel to me).
Thank you very much!
EDIT:
5) What's the difference between putting a keyword as "wiz khalifa snoop dogg" and two keywords as "wiz khalifa" and "snoop dogg"? Does this affect anything?