YouTube Video SEO Checker: title, description, tags and chapters

Up to 100 characters, and it cannot contain angled brackets (< or >). Put the words that matter most, such as what the video shows and where, at the start. The checker counts characters as you type and flags anything over the limit.

YouTube sets no minimum, but if a video has more than 60 hashtags it ignores all of them, and its hashtag policy says the more you add, the less relevant they become. Up to three hashtags from the description, the ones YouTube considers most engaging, appear by the title, so a few relevant ones are enough.

YouTube needs at least three timestamps in ascending order in the description, the first one at 00:00, and every chapter at least 10 seconds long. Put each timestamp at the start of its own line. Paste your description into the checker to see which rule is not met.

Less than most people think. YouTube says tags can help when your video's topic is often misspelled, but otherwise play a minimal role in discovery; the title, thumbnail and description matter more. Its developer documentation limits tags to 500 characters in total, counting the commas between them.

In the title, said the way viewers would search for it, and near the start of the description, where you explain what the video is about. That is our checklist, not a YouTube rule: YouTube does not publish how it ranks videos, and its policies treat excessive tags in a description as spam.