Need Advice Are Tags worth the effort ?

[raysallotment]

Are tags still worth the effort of filling up the 500 letter box full.

Heard they are only just guidelines and many channel i see that grow do not have any tags.

Tubebuddy is the only thing i have found to be useful of guiding the tags so is it worth the effort of setting up tags

 

[Beanie Draws]

I say yes, especially if you're a smaller channel. Good quality long term keywords will boost your search impressions if people are searching for what you offer. If you don't bother with keywords, you're taking away one area for potential impessions, in which case search is only relying on your title along. I feel multiple good keywords gives you multiple chances to show up in search results, which gives you extra chances to have your thumbnail seen and clicked, which then boosts your chances of getting into recommended if your content is good.

Good keywords won't save a bad video. But good keywords can definitely help a good video be shown to the right people looking for it.

Those who say tags aren't worth the effort, generally speaking, have many thousands, even hundreds of thousands of subscribers and an already established presance meaning they don't NEED to use keywords. Their social proof and titles are enough to show up in recommended and suggested. But if you're smaller, it's harder to be suggested and recommended, which means keywords and tags are really benificial.

You can see the spikes in my traffic after I started improving my keywords (there was an algorithm change in 2018 which followed average view duration, mine has always been low which is why my suggested traffic tanked) but 2018 is when I started taking tags more seriously, going from single word tags, the better tags. then in 2020 I went through more of my older archive of videos, changed the tags, and my search traffic boosted again. I believe this is evidence that it definitely helps.

why would you NOT want those possible impressions that could lead to more views.

 

[Damon]

Yeah, you need the tags. Just because some channels are successful without tags doesn't mean you will be successful without tags. We are all paddling a different part of the ocean. Some people have fair winds and following seas. Some people have to slog through a hurricane.

Take a month. Do zero tags. The next month do proper tags as Andrew teaches in the TubeBuddy tutorial videos. Measure the results over a year's time. You'll see which one grows more based on data.

 

[Kindred]

The way I see it, I' d rather take time to put the tags in, than not do it and therefore not give my videos every possible chance to do well. Might swell do as much as we possibly can

 

[TubeBuddy]

The way I see it, I' d rather take time to put the tags in, than not do it and therefore not give my videos every possible chance to do well. Might swell do as much as we possibly can

this is 1000000% a great take

 

[BraveStar]

Heard they are only just guidelines and many channel i see that grow do not have any tags.

I'll repeat the advice of another member on another post. Your first mistake is comparing yourself to other channels. Never do that. Their growth is not the same as yours. Content will likely be different, style and quality will likely be different, their social media reach might be different, etc. Basically, they might have found a different way to grow their channels but that doesn't mean tags aren't necessary and if you think about it how do you know their channel would not have grown even more had they used tags? Gotta keep all of that in mind.

 

[Naheed]

Yes, tags are important. Tags tell youtube what your video is about.
It is recommended to use keywords as they communicate what your
video is about. Initially, everyone needs to rely on long and specific tags

 

[TubeBuddy]

This video REALLY covers our thoughts on tags:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UqPv1kdweZI

 

[Damoforce]

With the combo of adding tags and YT SEO. Some of my old views and views in general have gotten more videos.

 

[alipress]

Let's see what YouTube says about it and I think he knows best about it !!!, "Your videoΓÇÖs title, thumbnail, and description are more important pieces of metadata for your videoΓÇÖs discovery. These ΓÇÜmain 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 play a minimal role in your videoΓÇÖs discovery."

 

[Stanley | Team TB]

Hot take; yes tags are worth it... for all of the reasons listed above. But if you need additional reassurance about the value of tags remember that having tags allows you to view how well your video is performing for these keywords. Even if you don't think they have value (they do) at the very least they give you insight into what is working for your channel.

 

[Travel Interesante]

If you're not using tags as a small channel, you're doing YouTube wrong.

 

[Lidia S]

Yees!! Please use Tags. Even if they might not work for some video, why take the chance of losing by not adding them? But in my experience, Tags are what bring my videos to a whole after adding the Title and Description. I consider them to be as important and I never miss filling out those characters.

 

[samytc]

YESS! Especially if you are a small creator like me

 

[TheShihTzuFamily]

Tags are useless! If u want to rank better it all come down the KEYWORDS IN YOUR DESCRIPTION! it mean whatever your title u going for that what u put a lot in your description! Youtube algorithm use those keyword to help the viewer to find the video on what they are looking for!

 

[Nobull]

Yes! Feed YouTube as much metadata as it can handle, and keep those tags relevant to your video. This is especially useful when you're establishing Authority on a keyword.

 

[Bears and Butters]

Tags are useless! If u want to rank better it all come down the KEYWORDS IN YOUR DESCRIPTION! it mean whatever your title u going for that what u put a lot in your description! Youtube algorithm use those keyword to help the viewer to find the video on what they are looking for!

We recently saw a YT video from Annie Dube saying that tags are pretty much useless too, and that YT doesn't put a lot of weight into them. We're still putting them in regardless, as it sure as heck won't hurt to have them.

 

[BOMC Michael]

a YT video from Annie Dube

Annie's videos are awesome, but you have to listen *very closely* to hear what she is actually saying sometimes. There is a bunch of nuance in her commentary. It is almost better to read her closed captioning to understand what she is telling you.

My take is that tags are as important as ever, just the way YT interprets them is different.

At the dawning of the internet the meta tags keyword in HTML was important, and people stuffed keywords in there. Eventually Google made that tag more or less useless, but it didn't mean that the keywords themselves weren't important anymore.

The difference was where Google was looking for them. Same today

 

[HowIDoThingsDIY]

Absolutely! Some of my videos show in in the top 5 when searching just because of my keywords and tags. I spend a lot of time and use a tag generator to get close, then TubeBuddy to fully optimize SEO and tags.

 

[TheShihTzuFamily]

Absolutely! Some of my videos show in in the top 5 when searching just because of my keywords and tags. I spend a lot of time and use a tag generator to get close, then TubeBuddy to fully optimize SEO and tags.

to see if that work try to open a tab going incognito then search your title to see were they rank. If you searching your title as you log in your account and watch your video it going to show you your video that you watch!