should I seo optimize my description

[strange mesa]

I don’t know if its worth to do this now in 2024

[plain prawn]

Depends on your traffic sources. If most of you traffic comes from search, then yes. It's especially important for channels that make niche tutorials and stuff.

General advice: do it, but don't waste too much time on it. Chuck in all your high interest search terms and call it a day. YouTube mainly prioritises the auto-generated transcript and watchtime for search rankings. Descriptions aren't as important nowadays and hashtags make no impact at all. The only benefit of writing hashtags is they allow you to clarify the spelling of words that the transcription system is likely to misunderstand

[weak grotto]

Totally agree with the @plain prawn and since I'm new YouTuber, my videos start to pick up in search due to the text in my description first and then then majority stop coming from search and only browse. So description seems to definitely have an impact.

[plain prawn]

Thanks for sharing @weak grotto but just be aware the just because your videos mostly came from search at the beginning, it doesn't mean the text in the description is the only thing that led to the videos being searchable through those search terms. YouTube also looks at the words you say IN THE VIDEO by analysing the video transcript. In fact, the words you say in the actual video are much more important than the description. If YouTube relied on the description alone, people would just flood their descriptions with a tonne of irrelevant keywords, making the search algorithm useless. This is what used to happen when Instagram first started out - they relied too heavily on hastags and people were just flooding their descriptions with hashtags that weren't even related to the post (#lifestyle #money #health #happiness) and garbage content was being pushed. Does this make sense?

[weak grotto]

Oh that is really cool that they do that, and it sounds so intuitive but yet easy to forget. Thank you so much for sharing this 🙏

[plain prawn]

No worries! The algorithms can be very complicated to understand

[obsidian orbit]

add relevant search phrases if you wish

to "SEO" optimise video now, as kermit said. You need to optimise script/description/text on screen/text on thumbnail/ tags a little so basically everything

still you wont get too much traffic is video can't compete with other search stuff on same topic

so as always =)

work on videos more than on other stuff

[ashen rain]

SEO is almost worthless in 2024 to be honest it’s used for common misspellings mostly

But the first lines of the description and what you say/ captions in the video are used to rank your videos so it’s still something to think about (keywords)