No tracking, targeted advertising, or personal profiling. No search history, and no sharing of user data with advertisers. Unbiased results, untainted by sponsored entries. Encryption and timed expiration. The ability for a business to integrate the software into its own products. 

A lot of people look at search engine optimization (SEO) as some sort of holy grail. They operate on the mistaken belief that if they can only master the sacred art of SEO, their website will shoot to the top of the search engine results page. To be blunt, this is false.

Per Statista, in 2019 mobile devices accounted for about 51 percent of total web page views worldwide.  What that means for you is that if your website isn’t optimized to be viewed and browsed on the small screen, you’re potentially alienating more than half your audience. That’s not the only reason mobile optimization is important, either.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning are changing the face of search engine optimization and search engine marketing (SEO). That’s the prevailing narrative, anyway.  The one pushed by media pundits and self-professed experts with only a faint understanding of their own content.

It’s no secret that just as with Google, YouTube’s algorithms are a closely-guarded secret. Unfortunately, it also seems to be no secret that compared to Google, YouTube seems in many ways to be fumbling in the dark. As noted by Ben Popken of  NBC News, YouTube wants people to spend as much time watching videos as possible, but its algorithms aren’t entirely sure on how.