Understanding the relationship between Alphabet Inc., Google, and YouTube and their respective ranking features:

Here's an overview of the relationship between some of the major players that impact SEO - specifically Alphabet Inc., Google, and YouTube.

Let's start with Alphabet Inc. This is the parent conglomerate company that was formed in 2015 to house Google and other major holdings under one corporate umbrella. So Google, YouTube, and other subsidiaries like Waymo all fall under the Alphabet Inc. organizational structure.

Alphabet sets the overarching vision, business strategy, and direction for all its companies including Google and YouTube. However, the day-to-day operations and core products of Google and YouTube are still run independently by their respective leadership teams.

Now, Google is of course the search engine leader that most SEO professionals focus their efforts on ranking for. Google's proprietary algorithm determines the visibility and positioning of websites in its search engine results pages or SERPs.

Optimizing your on-page and off-page factors to comply with Google's best practices and match their ranking signals can improve your SERP visibility. This is the core of SEO for Google organic search.

YouTube is a fast-growing platform for video discovery and consumption, which is also owned by Alphabet. Like Google, YouTube utilizes its own algorithm called the YouTube Ranking Factor to determine which videos appear higher in YouTube's search and suggested video results.

So optimizing your video metadata, descriptions, tags, transcripts, and engagement metrics can enhance your ranking on YouTube and get your videos viewed by more of your target audience.

While Google and YouTube have separate ranking systems, they do share some commonalities in wanting to surface high-quality, relevant content to searchers. So foundational SEO strategies like titles, metadata, tags, backlinks and more apply to both platforms.