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Hey guys, my name is Tim Schmoyer and it's Thursday, time to do some Q and A with you
guys answering whatever questions you have. If you have something that you would like
me to address and talk about this upcoming Thursday, leave a comment below or even better
yet check in the description text below this video and you can see how you can submit your
video question directly to me and I can have your face right here and we can talk, that
would be awesome. Here's this week's question. Tags are probably the biggest mystery to me
and I'm guessing for many other creators. More in depth look would be greatly appreciated.
Smiley face. Sure we can talk about tags for a little bit.
Basically all that they are is telling you to hear some keywords that relate to my video.
Now there's two things, two different types of keywords that you want to keep in mind
when your tagging your videos and that is first you want to start off with your most
specific keywords first. The keywords or tags in this case that you put towards the beginning,
will carry more weight in the algorithm than those you put at the end so you want to start
off with the very specific keywords first
And then get to more general keywords like towards the end. So for example, let's say
you did a video about your Big Mac at McDonald's. Some tags will probably be "Big Mac", "McDonald's",
"fast food", those are like specific types of examples but then more general ones that
you would put towards the end would be like, "restaurant", "food", just by itself, like
"fast food" would be like in brackets, you know, like, put quotes around it or just type
it and hit enter as a phrase. Maybe a word, like, "eating" or "eating out" or "dining",
those would be more general. Does that make sense? I typically try to make my titles,
my description text and my tags all kind of reflect the same keywords so I'm really honing
in on some of those specific things that I want people to find my video for when they
search for those things on YouTube or Google.
So often I'll try to craft a title that contains my most significant tags in the beginning
of the title, because again the keywords that are close to the beginning of your title carry
more weight than those towards the end of your title so I try to craft my titles with
those key words in mind but also in a way that is just normal English and is enticing
for subscribers to click through when they see it.
How many tags should you have? Well that kind of depends on your contents. Sometimes I just
have, five, six, seven or eight tags. Other videos I have like 32 tags. It all just kind
of depends on your content and what you are talking about and how specific or generic
it might be. Another little tip is to make sure you include misspellings of your tags,
as well. Like, for example, over at ReelSEO it's r-e-e-l-s-e-o, but a lot of people end
up searching for r-e-a-l, so we'll also include tags that have r-e-a-l-s-e-o with a space
and also as one word without a space but people are searching for it in a number of different
ways.
How do you know what people are searching for to find you? Well that's actually a whole
different video but real simply, just go to YouTube Analytics, look under Traffic Sources
and you'll start seeing what people are searching for you there. Let me give you a resource
to check out that gives you more information and help regarding titles and tags and description
text and metadata in general and that is the YouTube Creator's Playbook but there is a
specific page in that book that talks about this and I am actually going to link to it
directly. You can find the link in the description text of this video. Click it, it will take
you straight to that section where you can read more about all this and their advice
for tags.
And if you guys have any advice for this person and others who might be watching this video
later, please leave that in the comments below. Let's all will help each other out.
And if this is your first time hanging out, welcome. We'd love to have you subscribe.
Every Thursday we do some Q and A, interactive stuff like this. Just answering the questions
that you guys have about online video, audience development, YouTube, SEO in this case. On
Tuesdays we take a look at on-line video news and what that means for us who are video creators
and on Wednesdays, we do some YouTube tips, advice and other things, all to help you guys
communicate your message on YouTube and get it to the people who really need to hear it.
So I hope this helps. Subscribe, and I will see you guys again next week. Bye.