TagsVideo Tags
Tags are keywords creators add to videos in YouTube Studio under the "Show more" section of the upload form. Tags are not visible to viewers; they sit behind the scenes as a way to tell YouTube what a video is about. Each video supports up to 500 characters of tags. Once a primary ranking lever, tags have been heavily deprioritised by YouTube since 2018 and now serve as a minor disambiguation signal.
YouTube tags are creator-set keywords attached to a video that help YouTube understand the topic — a minor SEO signal compared to title and description.
Why Tags matters for YouTube creators
Tags matter only at the margins of YouTube SEO — they help disambiguate when title and description leave the topic unclear, and they help with non-English content discoverability. The strong ranking signals (title, thumbnail, retention, CTR, AVD) dwarf tags. Spending 30 seconds on 5-10 relevant tags is appropriate; spending 20 minutes optimising tags is wasted effort. The most useful tag strategy is including 2-3 obvious topical tags, the channel's brand name, and 1-2 long-tail keyword variants. Tag tools that promise hundreds of "winning" tags are mostly noise.
Tags in practice
A creator publishing a video on "kettlebell swings for beginners" adds 6 tags: "kettlebell swing", "kettlebell tutorial", "beginner workout", "fitness tutorial", "kettlebell form", and their channel name. The video ranks normally.
A creator spends an hour pulling 80 tags from a competitor video. The video ranks no better than identical content with 8 tags — overoptimising tags doesn't outperform a strong title and retention.
See Tags on real channels
FameLifter pulls public tags data for 500K+ YouTube channels — refreshed hourly via the official YouTube Data API v3.