Well, first of all, stop putting the same words in the tags that were in the title. That's just wasted space. I typically will put in synonyms of what I've written for the title if I've run out of details.

As far as what NOT to do, well I suppose this could be an example - http://www.videosift.com/video/Opera-singer-put-a-lump-in-my-throat

lol for eric. I understand him, sometimes I don't have idea on what to put.

I agree with karaidl: you should put in the tags relevant things that don't fit in the title.

*quality for the idea of helping noobs

Gold Star member looris has awarded Zifnab one published post for this quality Sift Talk contribution.

Oh, I just HAVE to edit those tags, but since it's being using as an example.

how about:

paul potts,nessun dorma,giacomo puccini,heartbreaking

or something...

I never put spaces before or after the commas, since you only get like 40 characters or something. Yeah, my biggest piece of advice has already been covered- don't double up words. My favourite title/tags is here:

The World's Most Giant Killer Spider!!!
tags: hairy, poisonous, running, spider
description: Run away!!!



That was my old favourite video until Cecilia Bartoli came along. Every time I loaded up my profile to see how my vids were doing (like 10 times a day or more) I would load that up in another tab because SO CUTE, and it's so cute because of the title/tags. Does it make it easier to find? Not really, but I love it. Part of the art and craft of making a good sift.

tags are almost useless, because they are hard to do and totally inconsistent between members. Subtitle would be better because people would naturally write better ones. I repeat words from the title sometimes, well, if you don't then you fuck up the tag cloud (which is fucked anyway but hey)

You have to think "what might people be searching for if they wanted to find this video"

Nobody is searching for "heartbreaking", and you can be sure 90% of the "heartbreaking" videos are not tagged with "heartbreaking".

I like the funny subtitles too, they actually give information about what kind of video it will be before you press play (as opposed to tags which normally don't)

And I try to write as many keywords as possible in the post description in natural language. Also I always try to include the actors/directors/writers by name because that narrows it down a lot whereas "comedy, french, punk" could be ANYTHING.

Remember that the related vid search includes the description field too now, so feel free to go to town on that.

I'll edit my own posts if I find that the tags aren't hitting videos that I think should definitely be linking auto-magically to them.

Then there's tagomedy - I love good tagomedy. I'll accept it even if it blatantly kills the related vid search.

But if tags are weak, or not hitting related vids properly, I will mercilessly edit.

Some word doubles like "mahna mahna" are not necessary, but often fun. Good thing to put in the description field if you can think of better tags to use.

does anyone actually use the tag cloud? i forgot that thing was even there. i frequently just use the tag field for one-word search methods to prevent dupes.