What are tags on YouTube? When uploading a video to YouTube you are given the option to title your video, write a description for it, and fill in some relative tags for it. By using YouTube tags you are essentially optimizing a video to rank higher in YouTube’s search engine. Tags can help increase the rank of your video, therefore enabling your video to get more views. In all, tags are the words that you enter into the tag box in order to categorize and rank your video YouTube.
How do you optimize tags for YouTube?
Start by choosing relative YouTube tags to your video and the content presented to your audience. If you made a video about a new tech product, use tags like “technology” and “product”. Do not overload the tag box with tags that don’t identify with your video. Random tags that aren’t fitting to your video will only decrease the video rankings. YouTube’s algorithm views this as spam, and will ultimately lower the rank of your video in the search engine. Read more about this at: YouTube Tags Help
Different types of tags:
Specific Tags – These are the one word tags like vlog or tutorial. Using these tags will categorize your video in a specific way and are best for ranking practices.
Compound Tags – These are multiple word tags like how to vlog or best of 2015. YouTube will completely ignore conjunctions and prepositions ( “of”, “to”, “in”, and “ect”).
Generic Tags – Similar to Specific tags but words like how-to and tutorial. These tags used to be suggested by YouTube until the company removed the suggestions for tags.
Misspelling Tags – Misspelled words are actually useful as tags. Try to use commonly misspelled words that people on Youtube would search for, your video will be in the top of the search results because not many people use this practice.
Watch this video for more information on tagging videos on YouTube.
To conclude:
- Avoid overstuffing the tag box.
- There is a 500 character limit to the YouTube tag box. People have success with using little to no tags and also using many. There is no specific method to success.
- Although your video may not be ranked immediately, YouTube will use the meta data to rank your video after a while.
Read more on YouTube Tags at: Tags for YouTube
