I suppose that my biggest thing is good analytics and figuring out what your specific KPIs will be for a specific site.  After figuring out the best KPIs, work on those, don't get distracted by keyword rankigns, those can change all to easily when Google decides to chagne the ranking algorithm.

Focus on why we want rankings: to get converting traffic.  If you're spending hours or days working on something, it had better effect the bottom line for the company or it isn't woth doing.

Pining posts is not the same thing as a ping in network terms.  Pinging posts is more eaily described as requesting the post periodically.

Another thing to make sure to do is to embed the video on your own site and create a video sitemap.  Google will index the video as being on your site even if it is hosted and available on YouTube.