What are tags on YouTube videos?
If you’re just starting YouTube or if you have uploaded a lot of videos to YouTube, you would’ve definitely come across a category in YouTube Studio called Tags. So what exactly are Tags?
As YouTube itself describes them, “Tags are descriptive keywords you can add to your video to help viewers find your content.”
In simpler terms, tags are keywords that help YouTube know what a video is. Since YouTube’s code can’t actually view a video, it uses the title, description and thumbnail and tags to understand what a particular video is and who to recommend it to.
What are Good Tags for a YouTube video?
Tags are unique to every video, and depending on what type of video you’re uploading, there can be a ton of tags that you can add to your video to maximise the visibility and reach of your YouTube video.
However, there are some Dos and Don’ts of adding tags to your YouTube videos.
Do:
● Use Keywords that fit the genre of your video.
For a gaming video, use the keywords ‘game’, ‘gaming’, ‘gameplay’ along with the title of the game you’re playing and the genre of the game like ‘horror’, ‘funny’, ‘action’.
● Create some broad keywords that describe what’s happening in the video.
For instance, for a video titled “Different ways to cook spaghetti”, use keywords from the video such as the names of the recipes that you showcase in the video. That way if you have the keyword ‘bolognese’ in the tags, your video will also show up when someone searches for ‘spaghetti bolognese’.
● Keep most of your tags between 2-3 words.
Since a tag can be made up of multiple words, it should be well within 2-3 words range. Try to think up what someone would search and write tags accordingly.
● Get inspiration from competitor’s videos or videos that are doing well.
There are various tools available online that let you analyse what tags other videos are using. One such website is keywordtool.io.
By taking notes from the videos that are performing well, you can learn what tags to use and what tags are most relevant to your video.
● Get inspiration from YouTube auto-suggest.
Auto-suggest helps users find what they need. And the way auto suggest works, is it suggests the most searched keywords at the top. So feel free to use some of those in your video tags.
Don’t:
● Use Irrelevant tags
Using irrelevant tags is a big no for multiple reasons, firstly, it makes it so that your video appears in places and searches where it shouldn’t be. You don’t want a “How to manage finances” video to show up in the middle of music videos. And second, irrelevant tags hit the reputation of your channel, because there’s no click through rate on an irrelevant tag.
An example of an irrelevant tag is using the keyword ‘recipes’ in a gaming or a woodworking video.
● Go overboard with tags
While using tags, it is important to make sure that you’re adding the tags that are necessary. Do not add 3000 tags to a video, that only makes it harder for youtube to decide where to recommend your video. Research shows the optimal number of tags on a video is between 30-40 tags.
And if tags still aren’t helping your video rank up, maybe what you need is more views and subscribers! Buy genuine, high retention viewers and subscribers.
Benefits of Using Tags on YouTube
Since tags are what YouTube uses to help users find the content they are searching for, they are as important as having a good enough Thumbnail, Title and Description.
One more big advantage of tags is that they don’t appear on your video. So anything that is relevant to the video, but cannot be added to the title or description, can be added to tags.
YouTube search also relies heavily on the video Title and Tags, so making sure that the title and tags on the video are good enough is absolutely necessary.
And finally, tags are also used by YouTube to recommend videos to the audience. This all makes tags a big deciding factor on whether or not a video will perform well on YouTube or not.
And that’s all for today. Stay tuned for more power packed content!