This page is going to show you how many total tags you can enter for a YouTube video upload.
You will also learn how to find the best tags you should be using for your YouTube video uploads.
🧾 Number of Tags are You Permitted for a YouTube.com Video
Tags (which are basically the same exact thing as keywords except that is just the name YouTube.com uses) are words and phrases you wish to have associated with your video. As a general rule, you want your YouTube tags to be closely related to the main keyword phrase you are targeting for your video.
The answer to HOW MANY tags you can use for any video upload is 500 characters. In other words, there is no limit to the number of TAGS you can use, but there is a character limit of 500, including spaces, so the answer to 'how many tags can I have on my video' is how ever many you can cram into 500 characters.
If the total character count of your YouTube tags exceeds 500 characters, you will get the error message 'Your tags are too long!' which seems to be a source of confusion for many youtubers. (this error message is not because the length of any single tag is too long).
Go For Youtube Tag Quality, Not Quantity
The very question indicates you are looking to cram as many tags as you possibly can in your video upload and this is a bad idea. Not that you shouldn't take advantage of all 500 characters allowed, but you are far better off targeting long tail tags/keywords. Because the tag limit on YouTube is 500 characters, if you use long tail keywords or tags you won't be able to use AS MANY tags BUT your video is much more likely to show up in more specific searches.
In other words, lets pretend your video is about how many tags can you have for a YouTube video. You could insert a ton of one or two word tags like ...
- tags
- youtube tags
- youtube keywords
- youtube tag limit
- youtube tag count
- youtube tag max
The problem with this 'tag volume' approach is:
- You are going to have a ton of competition on YouTube for such short tags which means the likelihood your video will appear in the related videos list (a valuable source of additional YouTube video traffic) is pretty low.
- A lot of your video visitors are not going to find your video to be what they are looking for so they will leave within a few seconds of starting the play of your video. THIS IS BAD. This is one of the most important metrics YouTube uses to decide how valuable your video is. If 90% of the people who view your video only view the first 15 seconds and then leave YouTube is going to, rightly, determine your video is of low quality and the visibility and traffic of your video is going to suffer.
Use A Few, Low Competition, Long Tail Tags
This is a MUCH better approach because:
- You may get less overall traffic but the traffic is much more likely to find your video to be what they are looking for. As such, they are going to watch most or all of your video which tells YouTube that your video is of good quality.
- Because your video visitors are much more likely to be satisfied with the content of your video, they are also going to be much more likely to click on any links, in your video description, that lead to your blog or website.
How To Find Low Competition Youtube Tags
The manual method would be to take your list of potential keyword phrases, do a Google search for each of them. Take note of the number of YouTube video results that appear on the first page of the search result for each keyword phrase. Any keyword phrases that show one OR two YouTube video results- keep. These are called YouTube keywords.
In other words, if the search engine shows NO videos on the first page of search results for a keyword phrase, what does that say? That says that the search engine does not think a video is relevant or appropriate for that keyword phrase. The search engine is saying 'if you use that keyword phrase for your video you will be wasting your time'.
You also don't want to bother with a keyword phrase that shows more than two YouTube videos on the first page of search results because it means that that keyword phrase is already saturated with video results so the chances of your video showing up on the first page of Google for that keyword phrase are much lower than if there are only one or two YouTube video results.
The Faster, Automated Way To Find Good Youtube Keywords
ViralYouTubeSoftware has the 'Find YouTube Keywords' program built in that works like this:
- Enter your list of potential keyword phrases, up to 32,000.
- Press a button.
The software will Google search all your keyword phrases for you and display, in a nice looking grid format, exactly which of those keyword phrase has one OR two YouTube videos on the first page of search results for each of the keyword phrases. The software, essentially, filters out non YouTube keyword phrases.
Free Easy YouTube Tagger Bookmarklet
One annoying thing about YouTube video uploads is the part where you enter tags. You have to manually type in each tag followed by a comma. If you try to take a line by line list of keywords and paste that into the YouTube tags section, they all get clumped together as one single nonesense tag.
Wouldn't it be a lot easier if you could just paste a line by line list of tags into the YouTube tags text box?
This is where the free bookmarklet Easy YouTube Tagger comes in. When you are on the video upload page on YouTube ...
- Upload your video.
- Enter in the video title and description.
- Click on the link towards the bottom of the page that reads
Show More (refer to Image Instructions). - Click on the Easy YouTube Tagger bookmarklet. A message box will show with instructions to paste your line by line list of keyboards in the aqua colored text box that will appear.
- Double click on the YouTube tags section and all your line by line YouTube tags will automatically be inserted into the YouTube tags text box, comma separated.
