Video Basics #5: Tagging

November 17, 2008 - 2:44pm by paddyewinfield

By Paddy Winfield

Wikipedia “defines a tag as a keyword or term assigned to a piece of information for the purpose of cataloguing.” This helps describe your video to the viewer and allows it to be found again by a quick browse or search.

The best example of tagging is youtube. After you upload a video it will always ask you to enter a few keywords or phrases. This is very important because if you do not tag your video correctly no one will be able to find it and watch it!

Let’s say for example I want to tag a music video for youtube I made for the artist Katie Costello. My tag would look like this: Katie Costello, folk artist, music video, Paddy Winfield. Now if  someone logged on to youtube and typed in any of those keywords, the music video would show up.

You don’t want to include any words in a tag that doesn’t describe what your video physically is…descriptions like cool or awesome will not help anyone find your video.

When tagging a video try and be descriptive in as few of words as possible.