Once again SeeZisLab Team try to study out YouTube myths, which is actively discussed by users in the Net.

Today’s myth is as follows: “If a video art is supplemented with an image containing key words, the video will get better results compared to its competitors in YouTube search results”.

In order to carry out this experiment, we took 2 virtual machines, registered a YouTube account per each of them, and created a channel per each of the accounts. All of these were done simultaneously. For these channels, we made 5 pairs of video files each. The videos were similar as for timing, bitrate, resolution, title, description, and tags. Then we uploaded the videos by pairs to the channel, and one of the pair had an art with key words written in it, whereas the other didn’t. Video files were uploaded simultaneously on both channels.

After that, all positions of the video in YouTube search results were taken as for title and description. All the videos were located together – one after another, inseparably. To construct graphs, we decided to do the following: those videos that were higher their competitors got 1 point, and those located below – 0.

These are the results immediately after videos’ uploading on the channel:

In the graph we can see that the video, which image contained key words, was significantly higher in search results.

In 2 weeksThe experiment was carried out for 14 days; and every day we kept an eye on changes

on videos’ positions.

In 2 weeks, the results still showed advantage of the video, which had a key word in its art image.

Having conducted this experiment, we can draw a conclusion that the video with an art image containing a key word had better search results when compared to that without a key word in its art image.

In addition, we carried out an additional test with pairs of videos, which image contained any other title and no key words. For this purpose, we additionally made 5 more pairs of videos and uploaded them to already created 2 channels.

The result was similar to those described above, but the idea of the test was to understand, if YouTube search engine found the video with a title containing no key words (we used just bag of words instead). So, the videos were searched according to these words, and in the result none of such videos was found. Thus, we can conclude that the image should contain text written in the title of the video.