YouTube Help viewers find your video

YouTube: Help viewers find your video

Optimize titles, thumbnails, descriptions and tags.
Did you know YouTube is the world’s second-largest search engine?

Give a snapshot of your story.

Small thumbnail images are usually the first thing people see when they find one of your videos. Thumbnails show up in different sizes and formats across the platform and outside of it -- so make sure your image pops no matter what size it is. 

You’ll want to upload a custom image for every video that accurately represents its content and pairs well with its title. When producing your video, it’s a good idea to capture images specifically for use as thumbnails:

Keep images in-focus and hi-resolution (640px x 360px min., 16:9 aspect ratio)

Bright and high-contrast images pop

Close-ups of faces capture the eye

Create a clear focal point by making the foreground stand out from background

Titles matter.

When crafting a title, be sure it works with your thumbnail to tell a cohesive and compelling story.



Titles also help both audiences and YouTube’s discovery systems make sense of your content – so be sure to include relevant keywords that help describe your video. Frontload those descriptive keywords in the beginning of your title and keep the whole thing concise because titles can get cut off – especially for mobile viewers.

Descriptions with appeal.

After your title, write a concise description that summarizes your video in one or two sentences. This lets viewers know what to expect and helps index your content for YouTube’s discovery systems.


Remember that thumbnails, titles and descriptions all appear in search results, so they should work together as a package. You can also include experience-enhancing links, like timestamps to specific moments in a video or links to complementary content.

Tag it.

Tags are keywords that help YouTube’s discovery systems surface your videos to new audiences. Create unique tags for each video’s most important topics, names, places, etc. and generate a set of general tags to apply across all of your videos to describe your channel (ex: News, Journalism, Afghanistan, Obama, etc).

Only use enough tags to thoroughly and accurately describe your videos.

Update tags when new and relevant viewership trends emerge.

Include keywords from your title.


Use quotation marks (“) to convey multi-word tags (ex: “Grand Canyon”)