SEO: Descriptions & Keywords

The description box is the last thing most people fill in, and it's the one place on the upload screen where a lazy decision can take the entire channel away from you. So we'll do the dangerous part first and the useful part second.

Every link you put down there has to be HTTPS. Secure, or it doesn't go in. Not a shortener you haven't followed, not a source site you grabbed without looking at it. Channels have been terminated over exactly this. YouTube crawled an insecure source page, read it as a scam or a gambling site, and treated the channel pointing at it as the problem. You were citing a news article. The system saw a suspicious destination. Check for the padlock before anything goes anywhere near that box.

With that handled, link your sources anyway. Every article you pulled a fact from goes under the video, and it starts on upload one, not after your first scare. That's a policy-safety habit more than an SEO one. The day somebody asks where your content came from, your answer is already sitting there in public.

Now the writing. A hundred and fifty to three hundred words is the range. The first two sentences do the real work: they hook whoever's reading, and they carry your main keyword, ideally the exact title. YouTube bolds terms in a description when they match what someone searched for, so opening with the phrase people are actually typing is worth doing on purpose. After that, summarise the payoff of the video, pull out two or three key points or timestamps, and finish with a short contact and copyright footer. Editorial tone the whole way through. You're writing a short piece about the video, not filing a document.

What you don't do is paste the opening paragraphs of your script in there and call it done. That's the standard shortcut and it reads exactly like what it is.

On a long video, add timestamped chapters. Someone who gets pulled away at eleven minutes now has a labelled door back in instead of a scrub bar, and individual chapters can turn up on their own in YouTube or Google search.

Keep the shape identical across every upload. Title, then a keyword-rich paragraph of about three sentences, then hashtags. Take the hashtags from what your competitors are already using rather than inventing your own.

Which brings up the keywords themselves. Finish your research with a small core set, five to ten words, then push those same words through every field you own. Channel title, channel description, channel keywords, video titles, video keywords. The instinct is to spread across forty terms to cover more ground, and all that does is leave you weakly attached to everything and strongly attached to nothing.

While you're in Studio, fill the channel keywords field. Settings, then Channel, then Basic info. Five hundred characters, which works out at roughly twelve to fifteen tags. Most channels leave it blank forever.

None of this needs writing by hand. Feed the full script to ChatGPT or Claude and ask for a monetization-friendly description plus hashtags, and done properly that removes the need for a tool like vidIQ at this step. One instruction to include: tell it to use only some of your keywords. Hand it all of them and you get a paragraph that reads like keyword stuffing, because it is.

Two secure sentences at the top. The same ten words everywhere else.