Do Tags Do Anything On Youtube?????

Ranking in YouTube search results is a huge deal. Almost 80% of the time, the first 3 videos that pop up in a search result are clicked on. That is pretty much common knowledge. If you're not on the first page of a search result when someone searches something, your video is not gonna get clicked. And if you're not in the top 3, your chances of getting clicked are greatly diminished. For every major search result there is, there are dozens upon dozens of YouTubers trying to fight for that number 1 spot. So let's say you search something. You wanna know a recipe for pie. So you search, you know, Oreo cookie pie recipe. What determines what pops up first? I mean, I'm sure there are dozens of videos titled Oreo cookie pie. What determines which video pops up first? And every YouTuber has their own theories on, oh, you got to put a bunch of meta tags in the description, you got to do this, this, this. But a gray area has always been tags. Do tags actually help your video rank higher in search results? Now many YouTubers will swear on their life that tags on YouTube make a huge difference, but I'm not just about to base my channel off of someone's opinion. I wanted to construct a test and see if they actually make a difference. So basically To sum my test up, if you search ZZZYYTTT PPP LLL, nothing will pop up. Nothing yet. I'm gonna upload a video with no title and no description and put that as the only tag and see if that video will pop up. Now before I tell you the results, I want you to leave a comment right now either saying yes or no. Yes, you think it will pop up, or no, tags are completely useless, it's a wasted feature, and the video will not pop up. Go leave that comment right now. I just— what? I just stuttered a lot. I kind of just want to see, you know, what people's opinions are on tags and see whether— yeah, so leave the comment, leave it. We got a couple more seconds and I'm gonna tell you the results of the— yeah, Jeopardy music. The results are no, the video didn't actually pop up when you search it. I uploaded a video with no title, no description, and one tag, and when I searched that one tag, the video did not pop up. So the tag didn't do anything in SEO ranking. But Beast, maybe you didn't wait long enough. Now to further prove this point, I uploaded a video with no title, no no tags, and those letters in the description. And this probably won't come as a shock to anyone, but when you search those letters, the video with those letters in the description pops up, but the video with those letters in the tags does not. So essentially, the tags do nothing. Things that actually matter on a YouTube video is the title. You want to have as many keywords in that as possible. The description, obviously put as many keywords and tags in there as possible, but it actually has to make sense. If you're just spamming tags or keywords in the description, YouTube will take down that video if it's reported. And then audience retention, obviously if you have a 5-minute video and on average majority majority of people watch past the 3-minute marker, YouTube's gonna be like, oh, people are actually watching this video, people are enjoying it, we're gonna make it appear higher in search results. That's a smart thing for YouTube to do, because if someone makes the title of a video something that's irrelevant to their actual video, the second people click on the video, they're gonna be like, oh, this isn't what I wanted, and click off. So the average watch time is gonna be below 10 seconds. YouTube's gonna see that, and it's not gonna appear at the top of the search results. Pretty obvious. And that's actually pretty clever thing for YouTube to do. And then obviously the last thing is user engagement, like the views, the likes, the comments. If you have a video with a million views and the same title and description as a video with 100 views, the video with a million views is always going to appear higher just because of the user engagement on the video. If you're still watching this far, that probably means you enjoyed the video, so just drop a thumbs up. I'd appreciate it. And remember, meth equals death. Make sure you unplug your lamps when you go outside. And