Correct hashtags means reaching the right audiences. Using the correct hashtag on your content is a good sign to dramatically increase your visibility, reach more audience, and chance of going viral on YouTube Shorts. However, many have a common question: Where to put hashtags on YouTube Shorts?
In this article, I am going to break down the right and green signal placement strategies based on YouTube experts, and platform-tested practices, which may help you to optimize your short videos on YouTube Shorts for maximum visibility.
Why Hashtags Matter on YouTube Shorts
Hashtags help creators to categorize their content on YouTube to connect it with viewers in a specific topic. According to the YouTube Growth Resources, hashtags are one of the powerful tools to promote your content and make the process easier for viewers to find your Shorts.
Creators who use mix and niche related hashtags such as #Shorts, #FYP, #trending, Year specific tags, and topic specific tags, experience a stronger reach and engagement on their content.
Where to Put Hashtags on YouTube Shorts
1. In the Video Description (Best Practice)
Video description is the best and recommended place to put hashtags because YouTube algorithm displays the first three hashtags from the description box as clickable. This makes your content title clean, and readable as well as notifies YouTube what your content is about.
Inserting hashtags in the description box help with:
- Enhance search visibility
- Send positive signal to the algorithm
- Categorize a content with the right audience
- Reaching more audience on specific niche
2. In the Title (Optional but Effective for Visibility)
To increase the chances to get immediate visibility on the platforms you can place trending, and relevant hashtags in the video title. According to the creator’s insight, the audience can understand a video topic at first glance if a creator places hashtags in the title.
However, placing too many hashtags and in the title can look cluttered and it causes violation of the platform policy as well as your channel will lose the positive aspects from the YouTube Shorts platform.
Best way to use:
- Branded campaigns
- Shorts challenges
- Trending topics
3. Inside the First Few Lines of the Description
Inserting hashtags in the beginning of the description helps content index faster than natural. YouTube algorithms always check that you are following the community guidelines while publishing your content on the platform. If your hashtags are relevant to your content, title, and description, your content might experience rapid growth.
This strategy would be useful with 2-3 broad hashtags (#Shorts #Trending). Also, 3-5 niche related hashtags (#EcommerceTips #ShoppingShorts). This kind of combination of tags are recommended by the YoTube experts to target specific and niche related audiences as well as reaching a wide range of audience in a very short time.
4. Avoid Putting Hashtags in Comments
Some newbie creators try to add hashtags in the comment section but this activity will not help you to rank higher or categorize content.
In my experience:
When I was very beginner in marketing I used to put hashtags on title, description, and comment section as well. Afterwards I experienced that all the content has ranked down and the channel lost approximately 78% of viewers within one month.
So overusing hashtags is not a good sign for your content or channel. As a result, YoTube may give some penalty for your channel.
How Many Hashtags Should I Use?
Although YouTube doesn’t specify how many hashtags should be used in a single post, YouTube experts recommended that 3-8 would be the best practices to rank a content because using too many tags in a single post looks spammy and YouTube penalizes the content and rank down channel.
Here are some useful guides to optimize content:
- General tags like #trending, #FYP, #Shorts
- Use Year specific tags
- Local tags (Like #italyfoods)
- Specific tags related to content and niche
Tips for Using Hashtags Effectively
The best way to make use of your hashtag strategy:
Keep hashtags relevant
Keeping relevant tags can enhance your content visibility over the search results.
Mix broad and niche tags
This method not only increases your reach but also targets the specific audience.
Use branded hashtags for campaign
Branded tags usually help to build a community and track engagement.
Update hashtags as trends change
Trends are continuously changing so updating tags according to the trends can reach your short videos to more people.
Conclusion
Knowing the right place to put hashtags is one of the key factors in YouTube Shorts to get instant visibility to the correct audience and gather audience attention. The best place to put a hashtag is in the description. Although you can place them in the title, YouTube automatically marks the first three hashtags as clickable from the description box. However, mixing niche related, trending, and branded hashtags and placing them by following the right guidelines–your Shorts video can reach a wide range of audience.