- Our YouTube tags dead?
Let's talk about it.
(music chime)
Hey tube buddies, welcome or welcome back to the channel.
You may in the past have seen a lot of people talking about
how YouTube tags are completely dead or worthless
or not worth using anymore.
And I want to actually provide a counterpoint as to why
I think some people are thinking about this
in the wrong way.
So if you're ready, let's get started.
So the first thing we have to establish is where are tags
and what are tags.
So for the first part where tags are, there's going to be
a box further down in your video details page
and it's gonna have a character limit of 500 characters.
I've seen some people talk in the past about how you can
have only a certain amount of tags, that's not true.
The tag limit is 500 characters.
Now how you choose to split that up into single word tags
which I never recommend or long-tail keyword tags,
that is going to be up to you, but just know that the limit
is 500 characters.
The next thing to tackle is that tags are by definition
a piece of metadata that YouTube uses to help classify
and understand what your videos are going to be about.
Other pieces of metadata are going to include things as
what you're saying in a video, your title, your description,
your thumbnail, and the tags that you use.
Question of the day, What do you think about tags
and are you still using them?
Comment down below.
One thing that tags clearly are not as a place to put
misleading information about your video or the subject
that you'll be talking about.
In fact, this is going to be in direct violation
to YouTube policy around misleading metadata.
Now this is important to know because
misleading metadata can come in the forms of titles,
descriptions, thumbnails, and tags, and it can keep you
from being monetized or perhaps can get
your channel taken down.
Now here's the official word from YouTube
about tags and videos.
I'm gonna put it up on screen as well
so you can read it with me.
"Tags are descriptive keywords you can add to your video
to help viewers find your content.
Your videos, title thumbnail, and description
are more important pieces of metadata
for your video's discovery.
These main pieces of information help viewers decide
which videos to watch.
Tags can be useful if the content of your video
is commonly misspelled, otherwise tags will play
a minimal role in your videos discovery.
Adding excessive tags to your video description is against
our policies on spam, deceptive practices and scams."
I've definitely seen it on YouTube or a lot of people
will try to add a bunch of what looked like tags
or keyword phrases at the bottom of their description box.
Please don't do that.
That's actually also part of what they're referring to
for excessive, misleading metadata and keyword stuffing.
So please don't do that for your videos.
I'll even link an article down below in the description box
about misleading metadata.
Now, in my personal opinion, I do happen to think
there's a large difference between a tag that you might
use in the tag section and the keyword that you're trying
to go after in your title.
One thing that I see over and over again is that people
are using these single word tags in something
that is very highly competitive, it's not actually
about what the video is.
When I see people using these single word tags
that are highly competitive I get that they haven't fully
grasped onto the idea of how to use Keyword Explorer
to their advantage and they're confusing the two.
One thing to notate is that YouTube did not say that
it plays zero role, just a minimal role.
So if it still plays a role and they're giving me
the field and haven't taken it away,
then I'm going to go ahead and use the metadata field
that is provided to me and use my tag section,
but I'm not gonna spend a ton of time thinking about
the perfect tags.
I'm gonna use TubeBuddy to go ahead and do
an instant suggest and on the relevant tags,
just add them until I get close to the character limit.
Remember that YouTube is still a search engine.
So if you are a channel who's doing a lot of tutorials
or how-to content, especially that does tend
to be evergreen, then I still think the tags and title
and description and using those keywords and information
is still gonna be vital to helping you with your
video's longevity over time.
I want to take a second and put on screen
the comment of the video.
Thank you so much for interacting with our latest video.
And if you want your comment to be featured
in an upcoming video, make sure you comment on this one.
So I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that tags
are not dead and not hypercritical,
but something that is important to learn about is our
Keyword Explorer, so if you want to learn about that,
I'm gonna put a video right here, go watch that next.
Thanks for hanging out with us tube buddies,
we'll see you in the next one, bye.