YouTube is the most popular video-sharing platform, with five hundred hours of content uploaded per minute. In addition, it is the second-largest search engine in the world, having active 2 billion users. So, optimizing video content is a must for ranking higher on YouTube search results.

Do you know that almost every brand uses Youtube? They use it to describe their product in ads and teach users how to use their products.

There are different components of video SEO, namely thumbnail, title, description, and subtitles. Viewers decide whether they should watch the video or not based on these factors, and it acts as metadata for YouTube. In this article, we will cover all the main details about tags.

What are Youtube tags?

Tags are words, phrases, or keywords that describe what a particular video is about. It tells the main context of the video to YouTube. Further, tags are influential in the easy discovery of your video in search results.

Youtube considers many factors for ranking your video like watch time, the number of views, likes, comments, and others, but Tagging is the foremost step to tell Youtube about the subject of your video.

Types of Tags

1. General Tags: General tags are category-based and related to the video’s broader topic, like the diet plan video is about fitness and health. Other generic topics are Food, Family, Environment, Entertainment, etc.
2. Specific Tags: It relates to what your video content is about; for instance, a parenting video could include dealing with the child’s misbehavior.
3. Refined Tags: These are generally about a specific group, their behavior, their specific nature, and others. It deals with tags related to your target audience.

Other tags are:

1. Irrelevant Tags: Some people use irrelevant tags like celebrities or most popular keywords, but Youtube considers it black hat SEO.
2. Misspelled tags: Sometimes, viewers put the wrong spelling in the Youtube search. So, you can use misspelled keywords to improve video search results.

The first three tags are the most important tags for video optimization. Relevant tags are helpful in increasing the number of viewers searching for those keywords. SEO services in India help in finding better tags and ranking your video high on YouTube search results.  

What is the importance of Tags for SEO?

According to YouTube, a video’s thumbnail, title, and description are relatively more important than tags. But, you can always make the best use of tags as there is a slightly positive relationship between tags and video rankings.

How to use tags for ranking high on YouTube?

YouTube marketing experts say that using relevant tags is always a plus point for your video SEO. So, how can you drop down the list of non-essential tags? Yes, you can make an informed decision about the usage of tags by:

Set the order of importance of tags

The first tag is the prime determinant of YouTube results. Therefore, use a specific keyword of your content as the first tag. After this, use refined keywords. Then, include the general keywords.

The other category of tags is keywords used by the most popular videos in your segment. When you use these tags, your video comes in automatic suggestions under popular videos. Thus, it improves the chances of getting more views on your video.

Don’t forget to add your brand-specific keywords. Your video will appear in search results if someone searches your video by your brand name.

YouTube Auto-suggest

You can find out various keywords related to your industry by the auto-suggest feature.

But, how to do it? Simply your keywords in the search results.

YouTube will complete the phrase by itself. You can keep your cursor either at the end or front. Moreover, you can find out even misspelled keywords searched by users on YouTube.

The optimal number of tags

Overdoing the tags will confuse YouTube as we also get puzzled when we get a lot of information. So, according to the results, 31-40 is the optimal number. But, using 10-20 relevant tags is also sufficient for your video optimization.

How many words can you include in a tag?

Single keywords are good for category-based keywords like comedy or education. But, it is always better to use clusters of words or phrases as tags that explain your content well.

You can even use long-tail keywords that usually have low competition, so chances of getting a higher rank improve.

Conclusion

Tags are beneficial for optimizing your video. But, how to do it properly matters the most.

1. Tags have a specific order of importance that will align your content with the search results.
2. Use the YouTube Auto-suggest feature to find relevant keywords.

Additionally, the number of tags, combination of words, words famous in your industry, and long-tail keywords can land your video amongst the top on YouTube search as well as global search.