How To Properly Tag Your YouTube Videos

Effective YouTube Video Tagging

Derral Eves explains the four different kinds of tags, how to properly create tags, and how YouTube uses tags to rank videos online.

Hey Derral here. Now recently I’ve been asked by a lot of my subscribers on how I properly tag my YouTube videos for my channel. Well, I decided to make this video to give you all the in’s and out’s on tagging to help your YouTube videos get noticed. Now in this video I’m going to show you four tags that I always use in my videos plus at the end of the video I will explain when YouTube doesn’t really care what tags you use to rank your videos in search.

This is really interesting, guys. Let’s take a look! Alright let’s go ahead and jump right in and get to those tags, now there’s two ways to do this. The first way is to come up to this arrow here, mouse down to video manager. Once we do this we can go ahead and edit an existing video. All we’ve got to do is click edit. And it’s going to look exactly like the upload, so for this example, since we always upload a video let’s go ahead and hit the upload button.

Now I have this little dummy video here, little example video. But let’s say this video is about the Google Penguin 2.1 update, a lot of interest in that, especially with those people that actually work in Internet Marketing or Online Marketing. Now the first thing is we’d actually go an optimize the video and go through all that, but for this video we’re just going to just focus in on the tags. Let me get rid of my default tags here, ok. Now the first type of tag I always do is what I call the “specific tag”. Specific tags are basically one word.

So for this example, since it’s about the Penguin update, we’ll go ahead and type in “Google”. “Google” would be a specific keyword. Now notice they’re helping me out, YouTube is helping me out saying “well do you mean Google the organization?” Well yes I do, so I’m going to go ahead and click that because a lot of people put that in, but let’s go ahead and put “Google” there as well.

Now the second type of tag I always do is what they call “compound tags”. What a compound tag is is several words in a tag so the first compound tag I always do would be the title. Ok, my title would be the “Google Penguin 2.1 Update” we’ll just say that that’s that. All I would do is just copy the title and put it in here. Ok that’s a compound tag, so it would have several words in there.

Keep in mind if you are doing a compound tag that is in the title yeah go ahead and put your conjunctions and prepositions that’s there. If you’re just doing compound tags just in the tag section just leave them out. Ok the of’s if’s and in’s don’t even worry about that, YouTube doesn’t even look at it. Let’s go ahead and go on to the third type of tag “generic tags”.

Generic tag is like “how to” and that’s a generic tag. Also “tutorial” would be a generic tag, “vlog” and if you notice down here YouTube is giving us suggestions saying “hey, video blog” ok so let’s go ahead and click that. Oh, “marketing” here are some generic tags that we’re able to do. It has nothing to do with “club penguin” this is a search engine update so why don’t we put “search engine” in there so there’s another tag that would be more generic, ok “search engine”, “search engine optimization”.

Ok so you have all these different things. Now the fourth type of tag I always do is misspelling, ok. Make sure you misspell a few words, see what’s more frequently misspelled, and you will notice that your video will show up because it’s in the tags. Now I want to reiterate something. You need to remember that in this tag section right here you can only do 500 characters.

Now it sounds like a lot, but when you start doing some of those compound tags it fills right up, so you want to be able to select the exact tags that you’re looking for. Now I want to caution you not to mislead your tags or titles in your YouTube videos because this really effects the performance of your video ranking. Why? You might ask. Well, a user might stumble upon your video from a mislead tag or title, and they won’t stay, they won’t engage on this video. And this really accumulates a negative effect on your video and even your channel.

Now what happens is that YouTube uses the meta information on your video to do a quick assessment or evaluation. Once it collects enough data of it’s own, ie. watch time, and user engagement, then it disregards all the meta information and just uses the information that it’s collected. Now think about that. You really want to be careful. Now I told my two youngest sons that I was making this video on tags today so I think I need to keep up with my father’s promise.

Derral Eves is an expert in social media marketing, mobile marketing, internet marketing, and video marketing. An area that is fairly new, if you are in the local marketing business check out Derral’s tutorials to help you become better! If you are not, check out Derral’s tutorials to help you grow your online knowledge.