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240 Part IV Promotion and Monetization

Figure 21.1 Keywords entered into the Tags field for a YouTube video.

The tags field is perhaps the most important for optimizing your video for search;
it’s where YouTube looks first. Without the right tags, great content will go unfound.
Add the appropriate tags, however, and you make it easier for viewers to find your
videos.

Optimizing Your Title

YouTube also looks within your video’s title for keywords that match viewers’
queries. It’s more difficult to fit keywords into a title, however, because you’re lim-
ited as to the title’s length. Specifically, a title can include no more than 100 charac-
ters, so writing a title that is both descriptive and includes a number of keywords is
challenging, to say the least.

But that’s part and parcel of SEO, in all its forms—learning how to incorporate your
most important keywords into various text elements, while maintaining the useful-
ness and integrity of those text elements. Yes, it’s challenging, but it needs to be done.

This argues for taking some time to figure out the best titles for your videos. This
isn’t something you want to do on the fly; it’s something that requires work.

The best titles describe the video’s content in a way that appeals to the target audi-
ence. They also include a handful of the most important keywords, those words
that target viewers are most likely to be searching for. Ideally, these keywords are
also the best descriptors of your video’s content.

What you don’t want to do is randomly insert keywords into the video’s title. One,
that makes the title less descriptive, and thus less useful for prospective viewers.
Two, it reeks of keyword stuffing, and YouTube won’t reward that. Instead, work the
keywords into your title in an organic fashion; if you can’t do so, then don’t include
them.