Are tags becoming irrelevant? New info from YouTube.

[KiddieToysReview]

I have noticed that some very popular kids channels (our category) use very broad tags to describe overall video content, such as "kids" "kid" "toy" "kid friendly" but they also use focused tags to describe specific items and toys in the video "thomas the tank engine" "lightning mcqueen" "mater" etc.
I have seen very little of long tail search phrases used as tags by popular channels and high ranking videos, such as "lightning mcqueen at the beach" or "thomas the tank engine at home where accidents will happen". In our category at least, long tail tags don't seem popular.
What we do: adopt a similar strategy - list the overall theme of the channel and video in the tags, then tag variations of the specific toys or activities. Lots of "kids" "toys" "cars" fun" "play" "kids playing"
In the description, we aim for several hundred words hitting all the tags and also some long tail variations, as that makes for more natural sentence structure.
The title has the main toy and activity, in addition to the common channel theme: kids, toys, kid friendly, toys review, Disney, Thomas, cars

Time will tell if this works or not.

 

[Sabrina]

I have noticed that some very popular kids channels (our category) use very broad tags to describe overall video content, such as "kids" "kid" "toy" "kid friendly" but they also use focused tags to describe specific items and toys in the video "

YouTube used to recommend to use a mix of general and specific terms. Also, bigger channels could get away with using only broad terms because they had a chance to rank for them because of their size.

Time will tell if this works or not.

Apparently things have changed and tags are now for additional keywords that don't fit anywhere else?! It sounds to me that basically we can stop using tags. Concentrate on putting all relevant keywords in the title and description.

 

[xingcat]

That's interesting! I know that Google changes its searching algorithms all the time, so chasing after the right keywords is getting to be a losing proposition. Better to just focus on the content and being clear about what the title and description says.

 

[subversiveasset]

I don't think that this will be a bad thing. After all, I think this is reinforcing something that was suspected by many people for a while -- title and description are more important than tags.

What most SEO places will recommend is that you should use as much of the space you have in the description as you possibly can. You should essentially be writing natural, organic English to describe your video in that description -- think of it as being a blog post that goes with your video.

And as SEO for blogs/articles will discuss, you still have SEO work to do -- your task is to include your targeted keywords organically in your blog post (or, in this case, your description).

So, it's the same as before, except instead of using a list, you're now writing sentences and paragraphs that organically incorporate the terms that you would previously have targeted with tags.

(This is why subtitles are seen as valuable. Because it's likely that you would be *talking* about the sorts of things your video is about, so that reinforces what key words you were trying to address.)

 

[KiddieToysReview]

Apparently things have changed and tags are now for additional keywords that don't fit anywhere else?! It sounds to me that basically we can stop using tags. Concentrate on putting all relevant keywords in the title and description.

Any best practice for how long the description should be?
Now I can say what the kids are doing with the toy trains in a few sentences, or write a 1000 word short story about the kids playing with trains.
I would prefer a few sentences, but if the description is being treated as a blog post, then a few pages would be in order.

 

[subversiveasset]

Descriptions can be up to 5000 characters (which would be around 800 words, according to a quick Google)

Everything I've read on seo for YouTube descriptions suggests that longer is better. the idea is you use your targeted keywords frequently (but within human readable sentences, etc)

 

[PrettyGamer]

I just don't know? Most of the people I saw with 30k views by just starting this december 18 and his channel has so many views like 8k a video told me that he just put the trending hash tags on his channel and gain lots of views. So I guess you still can use tags.. I just tried it out putting the famous hashtag for the day I wonder if it really is true or not..[DOUBLEPOST=1454325514,1454325380][/DOUBLEPOST]

Descriptions can be up to 5000 characters (which would be around 800 words, according to a quick Google)

Everything I've read on seo for YouTube descriptions suggests that longer is better. the idea is you use your targeted keywords frequently (but within human readable sentences, etc)

That's what I read to that you should make 2000 words blog on your description.. Although who can make that long even if I do google reddit steam for good stories and then detailed my description on what happened on the story I still won't reach a thousand..

 

[just Moto]

How funny Youtube are getting rid of tags and I noticed today Facebook has added a tag feature when you upload a video. Very amusing [DOUBLEPOST=1454326710,1454326079][/DOUBLEPOST]

Any best practice for how long the description should be?
Now I can say what the kids are doing with the toy trains in a few sentences, or write a 1000 word short story about the kids playing with trains.
I would prefer a few sentences, but if the description is being treated as a blog post, then a few pages would be in order.

I checked out FunToyzCollector once and noticed they would describe what the toys are named in different languages in the description. I've tried this in a few videos and have drawn a wider audience from countries like France, Brazil, etc.. asking me If I am from their country lol.

I have to credit alot of videos but do try to get a bit of a detailed description in there. A friend who runs a similar channel with double subs doesn't put anything in the description and ranks millions plus views on vids almost every time, so what would that tell you.... WATCH TIME

I still use long tail keywords in my vids just because I don't like change haha oh well.

 

[XXLRay]

My interpretation is that YouTube just reduced the impact of tags in favour of other factors that are more reliable. I don't think that they will completely get rid of tags soon.

 

[KiddieToysReview]

How funny Youtube are getting rid of tags and I noticed today Facebook has added a tag feature when you upload a video. Very amusing

I checked out FunToyzCollector once and noticed they would describe what the toys are named in different languages in the description. I've tried this in a few videos and have drawn a wider audience from countries like France, Brazil, etc.. asking me If I am from their country lol.
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Yep I saw that multi-language in some of the channels. Especially in the older more established ones. I wonder though about duplicate content - they all pretty much copy the foreign language blocks from each other and swap around the order. Wonder if the duplicate text strings would actually be a hindrance?