PinProject
I Love YTtalk
Ah that's time well spent! I did that a while back luckily for me I don't have 300 videos to go through lol But it does make a difference. You will notice it picks up in the youtube search under analytics.
Spent 3 Hours Fixing Tags
- Thread starter kami
- Start date
McCoob
Young Scientist
I am on YT since 2013 and even then I knew what kind of tags I should use. Therefore I do not need to optimize anything.Today has been a busy day for me! I spent three hours straight digging through my channel's videos and fixing a TON of tags. I had no idea that such a thing called SEO existed back when I started my channel, and only recently did I start to get a grip on it. I laughed at some of the tags I had. "Art"? "Photoshop"? Like, how the crap am I gonna rank for that? XD
I only managed to make it through less than half of my videos before I fell asleep T_T (I have almost 300 videos now, when did that happen?!) I'll get to the rest soon enough. Coincidentally, after fixing up one of my older videos, it got a comment, haha.
I'd love to see this having an affect on my views. They've been hovering around 100 per day for over a year now. ;o;
Phew...
Back to drawing ToT
kami
I Love YTtalk
Oh, glad to hear it!
It really is funny seeing some. "Drawing", yeah old me, I was definitely gonna rank high there!Thanks for explaining! I knew they had to be there for something xD
Spent some more time yesterday on it too. Haven't reached every video, but I'll get there! Glad to hear it made a difference for ya'!
Awesome
Saves you time and effort not having to worry about it. Wish I had known about it way back when, haha. Oh well, least I know now 
Stike96
I Love YTtalk
Oh yeah I totally forgot that they help with that!
Tarmack
Rhetorical Porcupine
Tags do absolutely nothing for how well your video ranks, just what it ranks for.
Let's say that you made a poor performing video with title/tags/description for the phrase "The elephant moos at dawn". You will show up very likely first page and maybe first for that exact search. Why? no other videos to compete with.
Poor performing video and the tag "prank"? You'll be ranked at the end of several hundred thousand videos in the search rank.
Video starts performing really well because someone posted it to Reddit and it hit the front page? YouTube may rerank the video much higher for the search terms.
At the end of the day, the only way that YouTube can reliably determine what your video is about, is because of your metadata.
Now, that said, there is another element which is the idea of watch time. If a video consistently gets short watch time, that means it wasn't what the viewer was looking for, which also means your tags are wrong. So YouTube can/will devalue a video on that basis as well.
All of this is why the big channels grow faster when compared to small ones. They get a burst of subscriber views which assists in the initial ranking of a video highly and continued views from the search rank and recommended video section immediately afterwards. Small channels don't get enough of a burst to overcome the search rank of well established videos long enough to show up in the search.
SEO is ultimately all about finding search terms and phrases that people are using, but that the competition just isn't there. That's how you do well in the search rank. And it's my own personal white whale, just as it is for most people on this forum. You'll never rank for the term "photoshop", but you might rank for the phrase "photoshop tutorial on making bunny ears glow in the dark".
Let's say that you made a poor performing video with title/tags/description for the phrase "The elephant moos at dawn". You will show up very likely first page and maybe first for that exact search. Why? no other videos to compete with.
Poor performing video and the tag "prank"? You'll be ranked at the end of several hundred thousand videos in the search rank.
Video starts performing really well because someone posted it to Reddit and it hit the front page? YouTube may rerank the video much higher for the search terms.
At the end of the day, the only way that YouTube can reliably determine what your video is about, is because of your metadata.
Now, that said, there is another element which is the idea of watch time. If a video consistently gets short watch time, that means it wasn't what the viewer was looking for, which also means your tags are wrong. So YouTube can/will devalue a video on that basis as well.
All of this is why the big channels grow faster when compared to small ones. They get a burst of subscriber views which assists in the initial ranking of a video highly and continued views from the search rank and recommended video section immediately afterwards. Small channels don't get enough of a burst to overcome the search rank of well established videos long enough to show up in the search.
SEO is ultimately all about finding search terms and phrases that people are using, but that the competition just isn't there. That's how you do well in the search rank. And it's my own personal white whale, just as it is for most people on this forum. You'll never rank for the term "photoshop", but you might rank for the phrase "photoshop tutorial on making bunny ears glow in the dark".
kami
I Love YTtalk
Removing old keywords and replacing them with more specific ones. "Art" and "Photoshop" are bad because there is too much competition.
As Tarmack said:
Lightsen
Animation Yey!
is this true? I want to rank on those pages not not lets plays or reviews :/ yet one of my other videos is on a games page just with the game tag