Stop Using YouTube Tags? Do THIS Instead

You've probably been told that tagging your videos is the key to ranking your videos higher in search and getting your videos more views. And I've talked a lot about the importance of tags in the past, but do tags even really matter anymore? I've had a lot of debate with my team who helps me run a bunch of my different YouTube channels regarding tags, and we've come to some conclusions about them that I think are really important for you to hear because it's gonna help you grow your channel a lot faster. Because you might be saying, how do you explain, for example, these channels that blow up getting millions of views yet they don't put a single tag on their videos. Well, in this video, I'm gonna tell you to stop using tags and also to never stop using tags in the same video. And no, I have not lost my mind. There is actually a scientific reason why both of those statements are true, and it's going to change everything about how you go ahead and optimize your videos. In this video, I'm going to explain everything and what you should be focusing on instead of tags if you actually want to blow up. So how much do tags really matter? In order to understand this, I want to give you an analogy. Think of your YouTube channel as a restaurant. And every video that you upload is a piece of food that you serve at your restaurant. Having good food, or good videos, matters a lot, obviously, because then people will come back to eat there or watch more of your videos. Now, the core food that you sell are your videos, your content quality. This matters the absolute most on YouTube. Now, thumbnails are the images that you have on your menu of those food items. Thumbnails make people want to click your videos. And titles are basically your menu descriptions of food before people go ahead and order. So you might be saying, "Okay, Matt, then what are tags?" tags in this strange analogy? Well, I consider tags to be your seasoning because yes, good seasoning can definitely help a dish, but bad seasoning can completely ruin one. Think about if you put too much salt, for example, on any food, you're gonna ruin it. So if you're tagging your videos wrong, you should stop using YouTube tags entirely. Whereas if you're tagging your videos correctly, then you can enjoy the little bit of an algorithm boost that they give you. It's not gonna be anything crazy. You're not gonna just get millions of views just because you put the right tags on your video, but it will definitely help you, especially in the very beginning of your channel when YouTube doesn't necessarily know what your video and your channels are about. So this is especially important if you run a smaller channel. And then as your channel grows, tags are going to matter less and less as YouTube understands more about who your ideal audience is. So you might be saying, "Okay, then how does YouTube tell us to use tags in our videos?" Because we should probably listen to them. Well, YouTube tells us the following. They say to use tags for common misspellings and certain keywords that your audience might search for. Now yes, that might be a little bit broad, and I'll explain to you exactly how I'm tagging my videos to get millions of views on YouTube. But something really important that YouTube does tell us is that they don't allow putting tags on our video that don't directly relate to our video. This could get your videos or your channel banned, and it makes sense if you think about it. When you search something on YouTube, you want to see videos that are exactly what you're looking for, and YouTube's algorithm is smart enough to know this and to try to show the best match. So if your tags are just random popular words that have nothing to do with your video, YouTube's gonna be like, okay, this is not what viewers want. We're gonna put your video at the bottom. So then how do you get your video to the top? What is the proper way of tagging? Well, I wanna show you that right now. I'm gonna show you exactly how I tag my videos right now. So my tagging strategy is that my first tag on a video is something that clearly describes the video and something that is very similar to the title of that video. I consider this to be my title tag because I want people to be able to search up that video if they're looking for something hyper-specific and my video will show up. Now, the next set of tags that you should put are what I like to call video-specific tags. These are tags that describe my video specifically. Now, I like to use the Warp Upload tool in my YouTube tool called TubeMagic to generate these tags. You just simply put in the unlisted video link of your video, or you simply put in the title of your video and it'll generate you those tags so you can just simply copy paste. I like to use that tool because it finds very hyper-related tags based off of the transcript of my video of exactly what the video is about. Now, if there's anything that doesn't relate to the video, very rarely I'll see something pop up on there so then I'll go ahead and delete that. And these video-specific tags are the majority of the tags on the video. Now the next set of tags that I like to put are what I like to call category-specific tags. These are tags that fall into specific categories that my channel uploads about. So I'll have a set of 5 or so tags that I put on every single video about how to make money on YouTube. These will be tags like "make money on YouTube," "how to make money on YouTube," "YouTube monetization," and this will go on every single video that is about that subject. So then those are that category's tags. Whereas my other bucket of content would have different category tags such as how to grow on YouTube, how to get more views, how to get more subscribers. And then we have channel-wide tags. This is usually anywhere from 1 to 3 tags that describe my entire channel as a whole. These might be keywords like just simply YouTube, or if you were doing a health channel, it would be just health. And then the final tag that I put on is usually my channel name. So my final tag for my channel would be Make Money Matt. So that's how I personally like to tag my videos because it tells YouTube, exactly what your videos are about. But as I was saying, I was having some debates with people internally in my team who were telling me, look, Matt, tags really don't matter that much. Look at these videos that have gotten millions of views with no tags whatsoever. What do you say about that? Well, I say that YouTube figured out what those videos are about, so certain things are definitely more important than tags. That is no doubt. However, if you're just starting your channel, why would YouTube give you the ability to add tags if it didn't have at least somewhat of an effect. So definitely has an effect. It can definitely help, but only if you use them the right way to accurately describe what your videos are about. So I say use them, but use them the right way, in the way that I just showed you. So you might be saying, okay, Matt, that's great, but you're saying that certain things are more important than tags. What is more important and what should I actually be focusing on if I actually want to grow a huge YouTube channel? Well, arguably one of the most important things is actually what is said in your video. Because YouTube creates a transcript of what you say in your videos, and then it will index it in the YouTube algorithm. For example, in this video, YouTube is gonna see that I talk a lot about YouTube tags. So it's gonna then categorize this video accordingly. So what is said in your video is more important than tags. What also is more important is the actual title of your video. And I recommend for your title, just include one relevant keyword that you want your video to be found for. But remember that getting clicks and getting actual humans to watch your video is far more important than just putting random keywords in your video. You always wanna optimize for humans first and then the algorithm. And that's mostly because humans are the algorithm. They're the people who actually watch YouTube, and the YouTube algorithm just optimizes for getting the right people to watch the right videos. You also want to make sure that your videos aren't too much of clickbait either. You definitely want to get people to click, but you want to deliver in the actual video what they clicked for, because if YouTube sees that people aren't watching throughout a significant portion of the video, it might stop recommending it. And then finally, with titles, make sure to stick to 60 characters or less so your titles appear everywhere on YouTube, including mobile devices and on desktop computers as well as TVs. You want that full title being shown. Now thumbnails Thumbnails are also far more important than tags because this is the first visual representation of what somebody sees of your video before they decide if they want to click on it. You want to use bright and vibrant colors, the least amount of text possible. If you're going to put text in thumbnails, keep it to a couple words, if not less. If possible, show a face in the thumbnails. It doesn't even have to be your own face. It could be an AI avatar, like for example the channel Zinni Studio, or it could be somebody else's face. The best AI, by the way, that I recommend for putting faces in thumbnails is called Seedream 4.0. You can access it through platforms like OpenArt. The best for doing AI-generated images. Now, depending on when you're watching this, there might already be a better software out there, but that's the best right now. And also keep the primary elements in the thumbnail to a minimum. So if you're in the thumbnail, it should really just be you, maybe a background, but then you wouldn't put any text, or it's you and just some text. So you want to keep your primary elements to 3 or less in your thumbnails. And again, these are best practices. You're going to see thumbnails that are the exception to the rules that I'm giving you right now. But it's really important to have these rules so that you can be going in the right direction. Now also more important than tags are video descriptions. So how do you write a description that works in your favor? Well, first of all, you'll notice that your YouTube description only shows the first few lines before you have to click Show More, and anything past that Show More button is considered below the fold. So what's above the fold matters the absolute most because that's what people see first. So you want to include relevant keywords in that first line of your description. So you better believe in the description of this video right here, there is probably gonna be the words YouTube tags somewhere in there. And then you can put some relevant links if you want. You can see how I format my description and just copy it if you'd like. For example, always make sure to link to a super long video on my channel due to the fact that it will keep people on YouTube for a long period of time. Also hopefully giving them a lot of value. But YouTube will reward you with tons of views and watch time if you keep people on the platform. So it's great to link to other videos on your channel if they're relevant, especially long ones. And also make sure to add timestamps to your videos when you can as well, due to the fact that not many people know this, but when you add timestamps and chapters to your videos, those actually get indexed by Google and YouTube. So when people are searching, they can find those chapters alone and not just your videos. And then also, as we discussed, your actual content matters more than any tags in your videos. And you'll hear a lot of people like myself talk about, oh, you just need to put as much value as possible in your videos. But what does value even mean? Isn't that subjective? You might say. And in my opinion, no, it's not. You want to take data-based information that has already worked in past videos and then just put it into your own videos, which means taking information from videos that have already gotten tons of views on YouTube and then writing that in, in natural ways into your script of your own video. They might be saying, Matt, that's all great. This is a bunch of great information, but how do I implement it practically? Is there like an AI that could do it all automatically for me? Well, I'm glad you asked, because yes, there actually is. And I created this AI specifically for myself, but you can use it too if you'd like. It's called TubeMagic. I'll leave a link to it down below. And basically with TubeMagic, we have a warp upload feature where you can put in the link of your video and generate a great title, description, and tags that you can use following all of the best practices that I just gave you because it's trained on everything I know. Not only that, but our flagship YouTube Scriptwriter feature within TubeMagic allows you to put context videos, and by doing that, you will take the best information from all those videos and then it will write it in original ways. And on top of that, it'll write it in a YouTube-specific way, including all of the best practices that I have for writing YouTube scripts including the best viral hook formats, the best YouTube script formats, the best advanced psychology to keep people watching, to open and close loops throughout the video to keep people watching throughout the entirety of the video, therefore giving you a ton of watch time. So TubeBuddy actually is the way to do this all automatically. Now, I do want to give a disclaimer. Anytime you use AI, whether it's my tool or any AI tool, always make sure to double-check everything and always QC everything. But it will help you save so much time. Now, the fact that you're focused on YouTube tags tells me that you're very serious about growing your YouTube channel. You would not be watching this video unless you genuinely wanted to grow on YouTube and you wanted to get tons of views and subscribers. And why are you doing that? Is it just to get vanity metrics? Probably not. You probably also want to make a business out of doing YouTube as well and make a ton of money. And if you actually want to make money on YouTube, I have a completely free training. It's directly here on YouTube that you can check out next to me right here. And in this free training, I'm going to show you the real way that I'm making money on YouTube right now. And more importantly, I'm going to be showing you the new method that's working right now. For getting tons of views. That's a method that I didn't even share in this video, and you will see it right here. And also how to monetize before getting monetized. I'll explain what I mean there. My name is Matt Parr, and I'll see you there.