YouTube is owned by Google. But when it was launched in the year 2005, it was seen as a simple social media platform to post funny and sometimes silly videos on. However, as time has passed, we can see that YouTube has become a tech giant. Since Instagram and Facebook are moving towards audio-visual content, YouTube is moving towards text-based content. To make it big on YouTube, one needs to use YouTube tags. At the same time, it needs to be noted that many big YouTubers have also bought subscribers to kickstart their careers.
The thing about YouTube is that just like TikTok, its algorithm is constantly changing. One needs to experiment a lot before one can actually make it big on YouTube. Even big creators fumble sometimes when it comes to the changing algorithm, experimentation combined with experience yields the best results.
Now, one thing that has not changed in recent years is the undying and unyielding importance of YouTube tags. Keep on reading to find out what YouTube tags actually are and why they are important. Moreover, you can also learn how to use YouTube tags in this article.
In real life, many managers and secretaries use the tagging system to organize documents. Tags basically provide a simple category into which new documents can be placed. On a similar principle, YouTube tags help categorize videos. With the correct categorization, a YouTube video made by a small content creator can be exposed to the right audience. This amplifies a small content creator’s YouTube video since a context is given to the video.
Many important tech websites over on Blogspot say that YouTube tags have become redundant, but we think that for a new or rookie content creator, they are essential. These YouTube tags can be used to a newbie content creator’s advantage, only if they know how to use them accurately.
According to the website and the survey created by Backlinko, it shows that a YouTube video’s thumbnail, SEO words, and descriptions are much more important than a YouTube video’s tags. But we cannot discount the fact that in the same survey, Backlinko also admitted to the fact that there is a moderate to a high correlation between the type and nature of YouTube tags used and the ranking of the YouTube video.
The time when YouTube tags really shine is when a common word is misspelled in any given context. Therefore, you can include a misspelled word in your video without including them in your title and description, and still get the YouTube video ranked highly for the same. Below we have mentioned best practices that optimize the YouTube tags.
- Any small or large content creator needs to place their YouTube tags in such a manner that they are descending in order of importance. Following this logic, the most important keyword will be the first tag. This tag will define the rest of the YouTube tags that follow.
- YouTube keywords work in such a way that the broader the keyword is, the better the ranking of the YouTube video will be. What this means is that for all intents and purposes, you will need to start off with tags that are the most generic in nature and then move o to hyper-specific tags. If your video is “top ten beauty hacks,” the overarching keyword will be “beauty” followed by “hacks” so that it can rank high in all the other videos as well.
- The optimal number of words per YouTube tag is about two to three, according to Briggsby.
- In any given case, do not go overboard with the rest of the tags. The basic aim and purpose of a YouTube tag are that it will help the people who are looking for a video like yours, find your video, thereby increasing its ranking. Too many chefs spoil the broth, and that is the same case when you use too many YouTube tags. The optimum number of YouTube tags that can be used to describe a video falls somewhere between 31 to 40 YouTube tags.
- The power of the auto-suggest cannot be underestimated. They help people find what they are looking for. YouTube has put a lot of thought into how these suggestions come up. In other words, these suggestions are curated and are not random. Use these to your advantage when creating tags for your YouTube video.
After going through this entire blog post, we hope you have understood the importance of YouTube tags. At the same time, if you want to increase the ranking of your video, you will be able to use YouTube tags most efficiently. But other parts of the YouTube video like the thumbnail, SEO, and other nitty-gritty details can’t be ignored by you in any case, along with the other YouTube tags.