YouTube Tips: How to Optimize Your Thumbnails, Title, Descriptions, and Tags and Keep Them Consistent

Jamie Jean Schneider Domm

Digital Strategist, Social Media + Big Data, North American Division

Justin Khoe

Digital Missionary, ​"I’m Listening with Justin Khoe; Life. Faith. And the things that matter."

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​While it is true that content is king, it is also true that marketing is queen. On YouTube, the things that most influence your discovery and channel growth (other than quality of content) are your thumbnails, titles, and tags.
 
Each video that you create should have one focal point or one problem that you’re trying to address. Your thumbnails, title, description, and tags should all work in unison to communicate that message and to optimize the exposure of every piece of content you produce. YouTube’s algorithm weighs all the elements of your video—views, length, titles, tags, etc.—to determine whether to promote that particular video in related search queries, suggested videos, and on the homepage. Most people will find your video through a search query or a related video, so it’s important to have a solid strategy to increase your exposure. Therefore, knowing how to optimize your thumbnails, title, and tags is essential to growing an audience.

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Best practices for each element

• Thumbnails often perform best when they tease a value or a story. Don’t give away the punch line of your video in the thumbnail. Seek to create an emotional response and to give the prospective viewer an incentive to click on the video. Pique their curiosity, giving them a reason to watch.
  
  Use a brief amount of large-font text on your thumbnail that allows easy readability. Help your text stand out by adding a shape behind it. This text can serve to reinforce the video’s connection to a specific topic, increasing the likelihood that a person will select your video among the competition. To interrupt their scrolling, get them to actively think about the thumbnail and how it relates to their search query or topic that interests them. This will better position your video for success.
  
  Keep in mind the average viewer will be watching the video on their mobile phone, so you want to make sure the thumbnail you create is clear and any text is readable on a small screen. Human beings prefer to connect with other human beings. Your viewer will have an easier time relating to the subject matter, and you’re more likely to invoke an emotional response if you include images of people, especially faces, in your thumbnails. Make sure their faces are large enough that you can actually see the whites of their eyes in a small thumbnail. You should also incorporate your overall branding strategy into the design of your thumbnails and your logo. This will help train your audience to easily identify content from your channel.
  
  If you’re not a photo editing pro with tools like Photoshop, no worries. Use free online tools like Canva.com to create your thumbnail from a clear screenshot from the paused video or from a high-quality photo you snapped during the video shoot. Use Canva’s YouTube thumbnail template to make sure you have the correct dimensions: 1,920x1,080 pixels for HD resolution. When taking screenshots, make the video full screen to increase the clarity of the image. Increase the contrast, saturation, and sharpness on your thumbnails to make the image and colors pop, helping you stand out from other videos. Thumbnails perform better when they are about 30% oversaturated and oversharpened, because this helps a small image to pop on a mobile device.
  
  ​In summary
  • Choose an image and/or graphics that stand out and pique curiosity.
  • Include large-font text that teases a value or a story.
  • Include people’s faces, and make sure they are large enough that a viewer can see the whites of their eyes on a small screen.
  • Incorporate your branding and logo.
  • Make sure the thumbnail is easy to understand on a small screen.
  • Add extra contrast, saturation, and sharpness.

• Titles should reflect the vernacular of the platform. Use tools like YouTube auto-fill in the search bar to find out what language people are typing in to search for specific topics. Basically, start typing your question, and let YouTube finish it for you. Look for very specific video ideas, and use the exact wording or variants of the resulting search phrases for your titles. More nuanced titles will help reduce competition and rank your video higher in search queries.
  
  Look at what other popular YouTubers are doing with their titles in videos covering the same type of subjects. Pay attention to the trends and what other creators are doing on the platform. This will help you perform better in related video suggestions. Model your video titles and other elements after popular videos related to your topic. Normally, the typical number of views a video can expect to garner is around 5% to 10% of the total number of subscribers to the channel. When videos exceed this, it’s an indication of strong content, a popular topic, strong title, thumbnail, and keywording. When you model your own videos after competitor’s high-performing videos on a similar topic, you increase the chances that viewers will find your content in the related videos and ultimately subscribe to your channel.
  
  Craft a title that piques the curiosity of the prospective viewer, without giving away the answer. Your title should make them think: “I never really thought of it that way” or “I wonder where they’re going with that.” You goal should be to get them intrigued in the same way your thumbnail hopefully will. Your thumbnail and title work together as complements. Therefore, the text should not be the same in both, but rather work together to give the viewer an incentive to watch.
  
  Avoid including dates, as this may reduce the perceived relevancy of your video, and it takes up valuable space in the title field. Moreover, omit any type of numbering system you may have developed for organizing your videos, as this also does not add value. An exception to this rule may be a series of videos that must be watched in order. In this case, we recommend creating a playlist specific to each series to enable people to binge watch all the videos, if desired.
  
  However, most viewers will not watch your videos in order and will, in fact, stumble across your videos randomly. When choosing your title, consider the perspective of someone completely new to your content. This is the first video they will watch out of your entire collection. Avoid any language that may give the impression this video is not for the prospective viewer or that the content will not be relevant on its own (i.e., leave out the date and sequence number).
  
  ​In summary
  • Model your title after search phrases.
  • Pay attention to trends related to your topic.
  • Craft a title that piques curiosity.
  • Avoid dates and numbering systems.
    
    
• Tags are used to help people find your videos when they type something into the YouTube search bar. The first thing you want to do is make sure you have a common tag used throughout your entire YouTube channel. When all your videos have one common tag, it acts as an indicator to YouTube that each video is related to all the other videos in the library. When someone watches one video, there will be a greater chance that the suggested videos will also be from your channel. For example, Justin Khoe uses “jkhoe” as a tag in all his videos. You’ll want to come up with something unique to your channel that no one else will be using.
  
  Don’t waste any of your tag space with random or one- to two-word tags. These tend to be very ineffective, as competition levels for those tags are too high. “Bible study” will be an incredibly difficult tag to rank for. “How to study the Bible” is a more nuanced tag with less competition and a better chance for your video to stand out. “How to study the Bible for teenagers” will be even more effective. Look for search phrases that are four or five words or more to narrow your competition for searches or related videos. Start with these longer phrases (including the title of the video), then find related permutations of those same tags. For example, “how to study the Bible” can be supported by the following tags: “how to study the Bible for yourself,” “how to study the Bible for beginners,” “how to study the Bible for women,” etc. If there are words that are frequently misspelled by people, such as “Isaiah,” you may also want to include the most common misspellings. The combination of these techniques increases the chances that your video will rank higher in search results and related videos, bringing new people to your channel from other channels and keeping your viewers engaged with your content.
  
  Don’t mislead viewers. Only use keywords that are related to your video content, as disappointed viewers can give feedback such as downvotes and negative comments that can hinder your video’s performance.
  
  Special note: You can only use 500 characters to encompass all of your various tags; if you go over that limit, you can’t upload or save the video. Be sure to prioritize the strongest tags. Use software like tube buddy to help you identify strong keywords and phrases.
  
  ​In summary, follow this model for tags:
  • Your unique channel tag
  • Four- to five-word search phrases related to the video (including the title of the video)
  • Variations on your search phrases (including commonly misspelled keywords)
  • Avoid random tags and one- or two-word tags.
  • Don’t use misleading keywords.
    
    
• Descriptions should not be neglected, as they are factored into YouTube’s and Google’s algorithm for search ranking, increasing discoverability. The first two sentences of your description are the most important regarding ranking, so be sure to reflect the title of your video, and include a call-to-action whenever possible.
  
  Providing description copy (at least 250 words) enables search engines to index your video for search query optimization. In addition, links to your website, specific webpages, resource requests, etc. will also factor into the search engine optimization of both your videos and your website. By providing both calls-to-action and links, you both encourage your viewers toward meaningful action and make it easy for them to take the desired action.
  
  For long videos, make it easy for people to find what they are looking for within the video. For example, a 30-minute video on Bible prophecies may cover many passages. Provide time stamps (lists of relevant timecodes)  for the various sections in the description to allow viewers to skip ahead easily and find the section that most interests them.
  
  ​Checklist
  • Begin your description with the search phrase (or a variation of it) that you used to determine the title.
  • Write your description copy using keywords to optimize search result ranking.
  • Include backlinks to your website, blog, and social media profiles to improve general SEO and visibility.
  • Include calls-to-action where relevant.
  • For long videos, include time stamps for topic-specific sections.

 
If you’ve already established a library of content on YouTube, go back and optimize each of these elements. This will cause YouTube to reevaluate each of your videos and their ranking, helping to better position your existing content.
 
These four elements combined help increase the authority of your channel content, but don’t expect immediate results or for your first video to go viral. YouTube also assesses the quantity of content your channel has produced and gives more authority (and better rankings) to channels that have more content because there is more for people to watch. Expect to put in significant amounts of time to create a wealth of content using these best practices.
 
To be successful on YouTube, you need two pieces. First, you need valuable content that answers people’s questions, meets their needs, makes a difference in people’s lives, and is optimized with proper thumbnails, titles, descriptions, and tags. Second, you need consistency when it comes to putting content out on the platform. Do this, and you will see results.

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