Do you make videos to sell products? Or do you make videos about interesting subjects and hope to get a lot of views? If you answered yes to any of those questions then chances are you looked on YouTube to see what other videos have been published on the same topic. These videos are your competition.
This article is not designed to show you how to search for quality keywords for your video. We’ll leave that discussion for another time. What this topic covers is how to find out what keywords your competitor is using for their video.
A few years ago, Google decided to stop displaying YouTube video tags for visitors viewing video clips. This notification was published on the Google Forum on August 16th, 2012. They reasoned the tags were not commonly used by YouTube visitors and it gave other users the opportunity to abuse this feature by copying tags into their own videos.
Google was right about these issues. Nobody really used tags to search for videos. Better results were always found by typing search terms directly into the YouTube search box. But YouTube tags will always play an important role in determining which videos are displayed for given search terms. So it is important to know what YouTube keywords show the best results for particular subjects.
I usually start by looking at the top 5 competing videos found on YouTube. I then examine their view count and comment posts. This is usually a good indicator that the video has high visibility.
Of course there are many factors associated to why these videos may be ranking so well. It could be the backlinking involved, the popularity of the webpage it is published on, the amount of times it has been shared, or just the great quality of work which went into the video. But it can also be the quality of the YouTube video tags used. Tags for YouTube videos are an extremely important part of YouTube video optimization. So quality tags for YouTube videos can mean the difference of receiving just a few hits or seeing a video go viral.
But Google is no longer showing these YouTube tags to viewers. So how do you find them?
Follow these instructions on how to see YouTube keywords of other videos.
Step 1: Search YouTube for videos on the subject your video is also about.
Step 2: Look at the top 5 results. Identify the videos with similar subject matter, have high view counts and the most comments.
Step 3: Once you identify which videos apply, click the video and pause it. Find an empty space on the page and place your cursor there. Right click your mouse and click “View Source.” For this example I chose to type in “VaporFi” and the first video was http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckMtQYfb6Fk. I am going to find the keywords by looking at the source code. See image below.
Step 4: A new page will pop up showing the source code of this particular YouTube video. For Mac users click Command +F and PC users click Ctrl+F to open the “Find Search Bar” for that page. Type in “keywords” to see the location of the YouTube keywords in the source code of the video page. See image below.
Step 5: Copy those keywords. These are the keywords which were entered by the author or uploader of the video. Identify which keywords apply to your video and add them to your tags section of YouTube video page. This can be found by clicking “Video Manager” and then clicking “Edit” for the particular video. You add the tags in your “Basic Info” section of your YouTube video.
After you save the tags on your YouTube page, wait a few days to see if your view count increases. Chances are, if you used the keywords of a popular video and the subject matter is the same, your view count will probably increase.
Feel free to view our accompanying video to see how to find YouTube keywords.
If you have tried this tutorial on your YouTube video, let us know how it worked for you by leaving a comment below.
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