How To Write Optimized YouTube Tags for Video SEO

 Hey guys, my name is Tim Schmoyer and every Wednesday I give you guys some YouTube tips. Today let's talk about writing tags for your videos. Now if you guys have read the YouTube Creator Playbook-- especially the one that came out a couple years ago, the first version that came out-- they said something very interesting. They said in there that the order of your YouTube tags does matter. And we're going to talk about whether they still do or not. But basically they said that you want to put your most important tags at the beginning because the algorithm weighs more heavily on the first couple tags that are added to a video then the last couple tags. So for many years, a lot of us creators have been following that advice here on YouTube. But over the past year, year and a half or so, I've started to suspect that maybe that's not true anymore and that YouTube actually doesn't really care what order you put your tags in. And so last week when I saw buried away in one of YouTube's official help pages that that is no longer the case, that the order of your tags does not matter, I was like, I told you so. I knew it. And so, no, the order your tags no longer matters. Now along with that though is-- it used to be that people would fill up that space with as many tags as you could give it and that was also a recommended practice in one of the earlier versions of the YouTube Creator PlayBook. They said, litter it with as many tags that are appropriate, both specific and generic tags. And the specific and generic tags things is also true. But apparently Google is getting smarter and smarter at actually figuring out what your video is about where they don't need you to litter tons and tons of tags in the tag field of your video when you upload it. Now I don't think it hurts to still do that. But what YouTube recommends now is that you think about how would you describe this...