Are the first 5 tags more important than tag 10-15?

AllVisuals4U

Loving YTtalk
I wondered if the first tags on a video are more important than the later ones. Is this true or does this just make a small (or no) difference?
 
Technically speaking, yes. However, it depends on how you approach using tags. Tags used to be seen as the all important element in getting a video discovered which just doesn't seem to be the case anymore. I would recommend making your first few tags the same in every video, for the purpose of increasing your performance in the "related videos" section when people are watching your content. This will increase your session watch time metric and at least your tags will be doing something for you. If you employ tubebuddy, you will find that as a new or small channel your video often doesn't get ranked for ANY of the tags you post on your videos, and this can be frustrating. Just do what you can with them and don't stress too much.
 
IMO, I don't know exactly but I personally would not worry about it too much. YouTube and Google are getting to the point that their algorithm is so smart that hard metadata such as tags are becoming less and less relevant. That doesn't mean that you shouldn't still put work into using the proper tags, but the algorithm is advancing fairly quickly to the put where they can categorize certain videos with very little extra information given.
 
In my experience, they do matter. Making the first tags the same as the video title made my videos rank higher. Making the first tags anything else at all, made the video not even show up in a YouTube search, even when I typed in the exact video title.
 
Yes. The same goes for title and description. As you move along the strings, what comes next is always less important than what came before.
The main kw you want to rank for should be in the position 1 in t/t/d, your 2nd ranking kw in position 2, etc. After position 5, tags are pretty much ignored. Description's value is exponentially decreasing after the 3rd or 4th line, titles after about 70 characters.
 
Tube buddy lets you rearrange by highest ranking, but is that good bad or neutral to sort it that way?
 
This is a great conversation. It's cool to know that these kind of things matter. It's a shame though, because my 'Upload Default' tags are the generic ones, meaning the specific tags go at the end. -_-
 
I used to be partnered with Machinima and they sent out a dossier kind of thing every month. In one of the dossiers was all about tags and they said the first 5 tags are the most important and help appear in searches etc.. the rest help with being reccomended and so on.
 
Back
Top