One of the easiest ways to get more exposure and views for your YouTube videos is by tagging them properly. Labeling is an easy thing to do, but it can be tricky to learn. There is a lot of play involved, a lot of trial and error. I’ll lay down the basics in this blog to get you started trying out your own videos.
Step 1 Determine your audience
Before you can start tagging, you need some keywords, and before you can choose keywords, you need to figure out your audience. Who is going to watch this video? Who is this video for? What kind of people will find your video and how will they find it? Putting yourself in your viewer’s shoes is the best way to start figuring out who will see 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, you will not title or tag your video, “Buying and Selling iPods on eBay.” You might want to title it: “How to Make Money Buying and Selling iPods on Ebay.” Now we have more or less the keyword and the phrases that we are going to tag.
Step 2 Choosing your keywords
When it comes to choosing them, being concise is key. Don’t beat around the bush and don’t try to include keywords to get additional traffic. Pick your keywords and stick with them, optimize on 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 headline 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 throw these phrases?
Title: The most important keywords and phrases should go here. Focus on exactly what the viewer will ask and place it here. So, for example, we can have this very title “How to Make Money Buying and Selling iPods on eBay” right there.
The tags: In this section, we’ll re-emphasize the important key terms and add a few extra ones to help you get relevant traffic. A couple of things to remember here is that you don’t need to re-emphasize your entire headline, some people like to do this to make sure they’re tagging, but it doesn’t actually do anything as YouTube will detect your keywords. of 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.
Description: In this section, I usually post a link to my blog post that I’m embedding the video in or to an affiliate product that the video is for. Obviously you should put a relevant link here if necessary. As for the actual SEO, I usually include an excerpt from the blog post or a short paragraph explaining 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 alternative forms of them. For example, you 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’ll notice, I’ve included ways buying and selling alternatives. You must do this for all main keywords.
Step 3 Don’t overcomplicate things
It can be easy to get carried away with unnecessary grief trying to optimize your videos. Remember to only choose a few keywords based on what your viewer is going to enter. Optimize for these keywords in your title, tags, and description. Keep it simple, no need to throw out everything but the kitchen sink here; succinct labeling is the way to go!