What Do You Know About YouTube Tags?

Despite the rapid growth of other video-streaming platforms, YouTube still remains its position as the best streaming social network in the world. YouTube tags are crucial for SEO optimizing on YouTube, just like it is with Google – the largest search engine in the world.

Without further ado, this article includes a guide to some practices relating to leveraging tags to drive engagement to your YouTube channel. Stay tuned!

What Are YouTube Tags?

YouTube tags, as known as video tags, are phrases and queries used to provide YouTube with a sense of what your video is about. They provide more context for the algorithm to categorize your content easier and help people find your clip.

Why Are YouTube Tags Important?

YouTube tags are one of the important factors to affect your ranking on search engines. When you use the right tags, your video has a chance to rank higher among other search results. You often catch a video having more than one tag, which is probably because the video content is usually misspelled with one another.

Nonetheless, our recent studies have indicated that very few videos (⅓ of the top-ranking ones) use the video keyword in their tags. The relationship between target keyword tags and your video ranking is, surprisingly, not that vigorous.

Part of the reason for this is the immense rise of semantic search in recent years. However, does it mean you can neglect using keyword-optimized tags in your video? Not necessarily. Here are a few practices you can consult to optimize your YouTube tags.

How To Tag YouTube Videos: Best Practices

These tips and tricks can leverage your YouTube tags to the fullest potential. Check them out!

First Tag: Keyword

The correlation between the presence of the primary keyword in the first tag and your video ranking is small yet significant.

According to YouTube’s guide for video tags, you are suggested to use the words and phrases that make the most sense to your video, so using the targeted keyword as the first tag makes a good starting point. We’re sure you’ve come across at least one or two videos that use the primary keyword the first hashtag.

Read more: How to Do the Best Youtube Keyword Research for Video SEO?

Use a Variety of Comprehensive and Relevant Tags

How many tags can you use on YouTube? As many as you want! But usually, you shouldn’t use past nine tags for the main keywords.

The next two – three tags after the first one should be used to include broad and relevant keywords. You’d want to throw in these phrases as they help YouTube understand your video’s context more precisely.

But remember, don’t try to stuff your video with keyword tags that it cannot deliver. It will more likely hurt your channel than benefiting it.

Even though they give you a higher chance of being one of the first search results to pop up, the algorithm is going to learn that fraudulence very quickly.

Do not mislead people as it is against YouTube’s spam policy. Things can end up badly for you as either your video or the entire channel is taken down.

Always stick with 5 – 8 tags that precisely depict the idea of your video, which can be found in keyword research of Google Trends.

The trick is to do thorough research before you have made your clip; that way, you can have control of what is going to be in the video as well as stay truthful to the specific tags you have used.

Read more: YouTube Search Trends – Ways to Become Channel Trending Videos

Longer Tags!

Don’t forget to include some longer tags of 2 or 3 words because, according to Briggsby, YouTube seems to favor phrases of 2 – 3 words used as tags.

Of course, this doesn’t mean you should add lengthy tags every time for the algorithm to rank your videos higher.

Let’s put it this way: if your tags are too short, YouTube may be confused with the information you’re trying to convey; on the other hand, if the tags are lengthy, the algorithm will encounter content overload.

Don’t Put Too Many Tags

Limit the number of tags you put around 30 or 40. Adding way too many tags can deflect your initial purpose, which is to rank higher on YouTube.

The point of using tags is to help YouTube understand what your video is about; by using too many of them, you’re causing confusion for what your clip is actually about.

Get Inspiration from Other Top-Ranking Videos

When you see a trending video on YouTube with similar content to yours, take notes!

Especially, be aware of the tags they’re using in the video description or video titles, so next time you upload a video, you can optimize these keywords as well.

If you use the same tags with the trending videos, there is a high chance that your clip will also be showing up next to the such videos!

Use YouTube Tag Generators

There will be times when you can’t come up with your own hashtags, and it is fine.

When such things happen, you don’t need to pull tags out of the hat, as these keyword research tools below are just what you need to find relating tags. Check them out!

• TagTube,
• VidIQ Boost,
• YTube Tool,
• Rapidtags,
• etc.

Final Thoughts

While you should find ways to add more relevant and descriptive tags to your videos on YouTube, YouTube tags aren’t that much of a thing for you to pay a whole lot of attention to.

According to YouTube, hashtags on videos are insignificant compared to your title, thumbnail, and description. So, spend more time, put more effort into those things and make engaging videos that drive viewers’ attention.