One of the easiest ways to get more exposure and views for your YouTube videos is by tagging them appropriately. Labeling is an easy thing to do, but it can be difficult to learn. There is a lot of play involved, a lot of trial and error. I’ll lay down the basics in this blog so you can start testing your own videos.
Step 1 Know your audience
Before you can start tagging, you need a few keywords, and before you can choose keywords, you need to determine your audience. Who will see this video? Who is this video for? What kind of people are going to find your video and how are they going to find it? Putting yourself in the shoes of your viewer is the best way to start discovering who is going to watch your video.
What you want to do exactly is pretend that you are the ideal viewer for your video and try to imagine what they would type in the YouTube search bar. Remember that YouTube is owned by Google and works exactly the same way with search. If your video is about buying and selling iPods on eBay, it will not title or tag “Buying and selling iPods on eBay.” You may want to title it – “How to Make Money Buying and Selling Ipods on Ebay”. Now we have more or less the keyword and phrases that we are going to tag for.
Step 2 Choose your keywords
When it comes to choosing them, the key is to be concise. Don’t beat around the bush and don’t try to include keywords to get additional traffic. Pick your keywords and stick to them, optimize in and around them. Let’s take a look at this iPod example again. “How to Make Money Buying and Selling Ipods on Ebay” is a good title to use. It is more than likely what a quality viewer will type in the search bar. So where do I enter the tags and where do I put these phrases you may ask?
Title: The most important keywords and phrases should go here. Focus on exactly what the viewer will ask and throw it here. So for example we can have the same title “How to make money buying and selling Ipods on eBay” right there.
The tags: In this section, we’ll re-emphasize the important keywords and add a few additional ones to help capture relevant traffic. A couple of things to remember here is that you don’t need to re-emphasize your entire title, some people like to do this to make sure they’re tagging, but it doesn’t really do anything as YouTube will grab your keywords. from the title first. Here we can see that additional keywords such as “tutorial”, “guide” and “help with” have been added because along with “how to” there are other relevant terms that may come up.
The description: In this section I usually post a link to my blog post that I am embedding the video in or an affiliate product that the video is for. Obviously you should put a relevant link here if necessary. As for actual SEO, I usually include an excerpt from the blog post or a short paragraph that explains what the video is about. You don’t need to go overboard here, but it’s smart to include a paragraph or two containing sentences with your keywords and alternate forms of them. For example, I would include something like: “This is a video that explains how to make money on eBay by buying and reselling iPods. To buy an iPod, I would recommend looking for the cheapest price from a high-value seller.” If you notice, I have included alternative ways of buying and selling. You must do this for all main keywords.
Step 3: don’t complicate things
It can be easy to drown in unnecessary sadness when trying to optimize your videos. Remember to pick a few keywords based on what your viewer will enter. Optimize for these keywords in your title, tags, and description. Keep it simple, there is no need to throw out everything except the kitchen sink here; Concise labeling is the way to go!