Longer or Shorter video titles?

ssfer

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i m new in youtube, i am planning to upload about about biochemistry of Enzyme kinetics. I ve done my research and have found that the key word "enzyme kinetics" is pretty competitive but "enzyme kinetics biochemistry " is less competitive (acording to VidIQ extension).
I really dont know if i should aim to write a title as short as posible, omiting the "biochemistry" or all other words (eg Title: Enzyme Kinetics); or if i should aim to write a Title as long as posible that contains many key words (eg Title: Enzyme kinetics | Biochemistry, Michaelis-menten equation explained")

What do you thing, shorter narrower title? or longer with more keywords?
 

Jack Decker

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What you need to understand is that HUMANS will normally only read what part of the title shows under the thumbnail and Google's COMPUTER will read the entire title. Given this, think short for the former and long for the latter. As for the latter, take up the entire title line. Put in as many descriptors as can fit. And note I said "descriptors" and not keywords. Just put a vertical bar between the title for humans and the descriptors for Google's computer.
 
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Nicekid76

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  • I went to the crash course channel and copied 90 of their most recent titles and counted how many characters they had. the average was 58.5 characters. Granted they include the name of the channel and the course in every video name. Removing that you it comes to an average of 29.6 characters.
  • I did the same thing with MKBHD's channel. (78 videos) the average was 37.3 characters
  • CGP Grey's channel. (18 videos) 31.1 characters

  • The average title length for these 186 videos I counted is 32.97 (if you don't include the crash course channel and course name) and 46.95 (if you do).

Hope that helps somehow 1613091188110.png

@Jack Decker's answer is likely more useful. But if you are a nerd like me then there you have it.

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ps. I'm not cherry picking (at least not intentionally) I just got bored over time lol. also i used a script to do this. I didn't count manually.
also I realize I'm messing with significant figures. rounding to 3 sig figs at first, then 4. I didn't want to round up to a whole number so I left it at 2 decimals. Don't tell my math teacher... okay
 
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ssfer

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What you need to understand is that HUMANS will normally only read what part of the title shows under the thumbnail and Google's COMPUTER will read the entire title. Given this, think short for the former and long for the latter. As for the latter, take up the entire title line. Put in as many descriptors as can fit. And note I said "descriptors" and not keywords. Just put a vertical bar between the title for humans and the descriptors for Google's computer.
thanks! can you please clarify me the difference between "descriptors" and "key words"?
 

Jack Decker

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A keyword is what people use to find something on search engines. A descriptor can be that but it can also be someting like "high energy", "calming", "first time", "trash mouth", etc. Use keywords for your tags and the video's description.