Do tags even work?

VanillaKimchi

VanillaKimchi

New Member
Is it worth putting tags? I feel like with the millions of videos out there, getting your channel or videos to even be searchable requires posting them around outside of YouTube.
I've recently experimented with a cat video seeing as those tend to always get views. Used tags such as "cat" "box" "kitty" "cute" etc.. Gave a description with such keywords and such...and ended up with a grand total of seven views.
In the past I used this same tactic as well, with similar poor results. (If anyone takes a look at my current channel, I'm in a state of reconstruction. Trying to plan out the whole system and approach before going forward.)
I'm not too familiar with the whole SEO and how it works.. or maybe YouTube is just so big that becoming searchable by common tag words these days just isn't feasible?
 
VanillaKimchi said:
Is it worth putting tags? I feel like with the millions of videos out there, getting your channel or videos to even be searchable requires posting them around outside of YouTube.
I've recently experimented with a cat video seeing as those tend to always get views. Used tags such as "cat" "box" "kitty" "cute" etc.. Gave a description with such keywords and such...and ended up with a grand total of seven views.
In the past I used this same tactic as well, with similar poor results. (If anyone takes a look at my current channel, I'm in a state of reconstruction. Trying to plan out the whole system and approach before going forward.)
I'm not too familiar with the whole SEO and how it works.. or maybe YouTube is just so big that becoming searchable by common tag words these days just isn't feasible?
Click to expand...

To be honest, I don't know much about tags really, but I do know that for them to be any help at all, they have to be tags that are searched fairly often but don't have too much competition. "Cat", "kitty", etc. have millions and millions of videos to compete with and aren't going to help you at all. It would probably be more useful to put more specific tags to narrow the competition.

Maybe try using a chrome extension like Tubebuddy that will help you figure out which tags are most optimal for your specific videos. That's what I started using and I've seen it recommended by many people. I still don't know how much it helps yet, but it would probably be more helpful than using random popular tags. Hopefully someone more knowledgeable will chime in. :)
 
honestly, while tagging is a big part i would say it requies a bit of luck as well, youtube can be a funny thing that way
 
I do think that tags work. I noticed that once when I went back to a video and edited the tags .. after a while the views started to increase. I think it also depends on the popularity of the specific tag. A lot of people would use "cat" as a tag, so it may not generate many views but if you were to put something more specific, you may have better luck.
 
Tags definitely do work. You have to remember that youtube cannot recognise images, so it would not know what a cat is if it jumped up and bit it on the nose. It does however recognise the word "cat"...so if you do not use that word in your description and tags then there is no hope that youtube will ever be able to direct viewers to your channel.

Think of building a youtube channel as being like building a house. Words are like individual bricks. Just a few videos and tag words will not bring any visible results, but the more videos you produce and the more you use good descriptions and tags you will start to see results. After that it is just a question of producing regular, quality material.

You are quite right about youtube being so big that it is a challenge to stand out, but the "flip side" of that argument is that with tens of millions of people searching for videos there is a huge audience for you to tap in on. If you can start by increasing your views from 7 to 70 then you will be on your way.
 
Tags are the single most important part other than your title itself. Tags are also the reason why so many big YouTubers are complaining about the new algorithm - because most of them don't tag their videos properly, relying on the previous algorithm which cared far more about your watch time and popularity than your title/tags/description and so now they're disappearing off search/not getting recommended.

The trick is to use long tail tags. What do I mean by that? Well use multiple word tags. Even if you're a huge YouTuber with 1M+ subscribers, the chances of you ranking for something like say "cooking" or "sports" or "vlog" or "gaming" are slim to none. So using one word tags is about as pointless as it gets.

So for example, say your video is a tutorial on how to cook scrambled eggs, rather than tags like "cooking", you'd use long tags that are things people would search for when wanting to find that sort of video. For example.. "how to cook scrambled eggs", "scrambled eggs cooking tutorial", "how to scramble eggs", "how I make scrambled eggs", etc. These multiple word keywords are actually searched just as much as things like say "cooking" because people tend to search specifically for what they want to find.. but a lot of big YouTubers only use those pointless short tags like "cooking" and so by using these longer tags you can immediately appear on the first page of search for them.

If you don't have it already, I recommend installing TubeBuddy. Even in the free version, you can see your position in search for different tags. Basically it'll show a number next to each tag to show you your position on the first page, assuming you're ranking there. If you add a new tag, you can just save changes, refresh the page, and wait for it to load your ranking, and see immediately if it ranked.

You can also do this for old videos - a lot of people don't know this, but changing the title, tags, or description for an old video, will cause it to be re-ranked, meaning if your video never ranked in search originally, it's never too late to optimise it and get it to start ranking now.

Here's an example of what my tags look like on my most popular video. Notice the lack of short tags, and how I'm ranking on the first page for all but 2 of them (those green numbers == my position on the first page, 1 being the top, 20 being the bottom)
tCUdfdy.png
 
JesusGreen said:
Tags are the single most important part other than your title itself. Tags are also the reason why so many big YouTubers are complaining about the new algorithm - because most of them don't tag their videos properly, relying on the previous algorithm which cared far more about your watch time and popularity than your title/tags/description and so now they're disappearing off search/not getting recommended.

The trick is to use long tail tags. What do I mean by that? Well use multiple word tags. Even if you're a huge YouTuber with 1M+ subscribers, the chances of you ranking for something like say "cooking" or "sports" or "vlog" or "gaming" are slim to none. So using one word tags is about as pointless as it gets.

So for example, say your video is a tutorial on how to cook scrambled eggs, rather than tags like "cooking", you'd use long tags that are things people would search for when wanting to find that sort of video. For example.. "how to cook scrambled eggs", "scrambled eggs cooking tutorial", "how to scramble eggs", "how I make scrambled eggs", etc. These multiple word keywords are actually searched just as much as things like say "cooking" because people tend to search specifically for what they want to find.. but a lot of big YouTubers only use those pointless short tags like "cooking" and so by using these longer tags you can immediately appear on the first page of search for them.

If you don't have it already, I recommend installing TubeBuddy. Even in the free version, you can see your position in search for different tags. Basically it'll show a number next to each tag to show you your position on the first page, assuming you're ranking there. If you add a new tag, you can just save changes, refresh the page, and wait for it to load your ranking, and see immediately if it ranked.

You can also do this for old videos - a lot of people don't know this, but changing the title, tags, or description for an old video, will cause it to be re-ranked, meaning if your video never ranked in search originally, it's never too late to optimise it and get it to start ranking now.

Here's an example of what my tags look like on my most popular video. Notice the lack of short tags, and how I'm ranking on the first page for all but 2 of them (those green numbers == my position on the first page, 1 being the top, 20 being the bottom)
tCUdfdy.png
Click to expand...
This picture says it all. Every video you have should be like this. My latest video landed between 2 videos with millions of views and couldn't happen without tags
 
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