YouTube Tag Extractor
About YouTube Tags
YouTube tags are the hidden metatags associated with videos on YouTube. Not all
videos have these tags as it’s up to the
video publisher to add them when they upload the video.
The Tag Extractor tool is a handy way of extracting and revealing these meta tags associated with
any public video.
Extracting YouTube Tags can be very insightful to understand how competitor videos and other
high-performing videos are
using these tags to boost their performance.
Tags are not to be confused with Hashtags which are displayed in the video
description and above the video title.
What are YouTube Tags?
The confusing thing about YouTube is there are two types of tags:
- Tags: which are the invisible “meta” Tags associated with a video. This is what the Tag
Extractor extracts
- Hashtags: which are the visible tags shown above a video title. See more information
about YouTube Hashtags.
Tags are added to a video when it is uploaded on YouTube. Unlike Hashtags, they do
not have pound (#) signs in front of
them and they can also contain spaces to encompass a string of multiple words. Best practice is to
use all lowercase
Tags with alpha-numeric characters.
A YouTube video can have up to 500 characters worth of Tags - which is a lot! In
the example above, we can see the
SEO prime video has 11 Tags. Altogether these Tags only take up 164 characters of the 500 limits, so
there’s room for
many more.
Now here comes the magic. Using the YouTube Tag Extractor, we can easily reveal
these hidden meta tags with the click of
a button:
You’ll notice, the Tags are importantly extracted in exactly the same order that
the author has used. This gives you a
really great insight about what the author thinks is (a) the most important topics in the video and
(b) the highest
priority tags for video SEO.
Why are YouTube Tags important?
So now we know the YouTube Tag Extractor works like magic on any public YouTube
video and extracts the invisible meta
tags whilst maintaining the order of those Tags as denoted by the author of the video.
But why is this important? You’re likely reading this page at the moment
because you’re interested in the overall topic
of Video SEO. We know from YouTube themselves that many signals contribute to the overall ranking in
the search result
page (title, description, hashtags, thumbnail, tags, quality of video, etc.).
We recommend getting the basics right and utilize all the features that YouTube
provide to categorize and apply meaning
to your videos. The jury might be out as to the degree of influence the hidden meta tags have on
search result rankings,
but our recommendation is always to err on the side of optimization and use all YouTube features
together. After all,
the more YouTube understands what your video is about, the more chance your videos will rank higher
in YouTube search
results.
YouTube Tags strategy
There are some strategic considerations when extracting Tags from competitor
videos. There are two possible scenarios
when extracting Tags from a YouTube video using this tool:
1. The video has no Tags: this is actually quite common since the Tags field
is hidden behind the “Show More” text link
right at the bottom of the video details page in YouTube Studio. So, unless your competitors are
YouTube-savvy, they will
likely look straight past this and upload the video with zero tags. This is a good outcome for you
because any tags you
add to your video will be better. Consider the wording competitors use in the video title and
description and if they
use any Hashtags in the video description.
2. The video has Tags: like the example above from SEO prime which revealed
11 Tags on their video, the next step is to
use your best judgement to assess the quality of these Tags. Try to look for anything unexpected or
unusual about the
Tags and the ordering of those Tags. Again, the above example from SEO prime is a very typical group
of Tags which start
with the brand term “SEO prime”, then include broad category terms like “SEO” and go wider to
include sub-category or
niche terms like “SEO reporting”.
The ordering of these Tags gives you a big clue about how they think about their key terms. For
direct competitors, we
recommend using similar broad Tags to remain competitive but utilize some unique Tags as well to
capture niche searches
where you may have a competitive advantage.
The great thing about Tags is that you can edit them after you publish your videos
too. So, if you feel some of your
videos could be performing better in search or competitors are outperforming you on some key terms,
try editing your
Tags accordingly.
One final consideration in thinking about your Tags is what YouTube describe directly above the Tags
input box:
If you encounter any problem, do not hesitate to
contact us
