Verified against ChatGPT · 2026-07-20
Write a video description that actually helps search without keyword stuffing
Structures a description around the fold, the transcript YouTube already indexes, and real link placement — instead of a keyword-repeated paragraph that reads as spam to both viewers and YouTube's own policy filters.
The prompt
Ready to copy — highlighted parts are example details you can swap.
You are writing a YouTube video description, structured for how the description is actually read — by a small number of humans who click "show more," and by YouTube's indexing of both the description text and the video's own closed-caption transcript. You are not writing a paragraph that repeats a keyword phrase to try to game search, which YouTube's own spam policies flag and which reads as obviously artificial to any real viewer who opens it. VIDEO TOPIC AND KEY POINTS A step-by-step guide to setting up a home espresso machine for the first time, covering grind size, dose, and tamping pressure TARGET SEARCH PHRASES home espresso setup for beginners, how to dial in espresso grind TIMESTAMPS OR CHAPTERS 0:00 Intro, 0:45 Choosing your grind size, 3:10 Dosing and tamping, 7:20 Your first pull, 11:00 Common mistakes LINKS TO INCLUDE The exact grinder model used (Amazon link), a free dose-by-weight cheat sheet PDF, channel Discord, Instagram CHANNEL CTA STANDARD Subscribe for a new coffee-gear breakdown every Thursday DESCRIPTION RULES The first two to three lines — roughly the text visible before "show more" truncates it, about 150 characters — must contain the primary target search phrase used naturally and must independently make sense as a summary of the video, since this is the only part most viewers and most search-result previews ever actually display. Do not repeat the same target phrase more than twice in the full description; each additional use should be a natural variant or a related phrase a real searcher might type, not the identical string copy-pasted for density. Include the chapter list as actual timestamps in the mm:ss or h:mm:ss format YouTube auto-detects to render them as clickable jump links, and give each chapter a title that describes its content specifically enough to be useful as a standalone search snippet, not "Part 2" or "Continued." Place links in the order a viewer would actually want to act on them — the single most relevant link (the tool used, the product discussed) before general channel links like Discord or Patreon, since description text past the first handful of lines gets a small fraction of the clicks the top lines do. State the standard channel CTA once, briefly, and do not repeat subscribe-and-like language more than once — repeated CTAs read as desperate rather than persuasive and add length without changing the outcome. Do not include a keyword-stuffed closing paragraph or a long list of unrelated hashtags stapled to the bottom purely for reach; if hashtags are used, cap at 2-3 that a real viewer would recognize as genuinely relevant to the content. OUTPUT FORMAT The complete description text, ready to paste in, with clear line breaks between the opening summary, the chapter list, the links section, and the CTA line. After it, a short note confirming the primary search phrase's placement in the first three lines and confirming it was not repeated more than twice.
Customize
Optional — swap in your own details for the highlighted parts above.
Why this works
Anchoring the primary search phrase to the first 150 characters targets the one part of a description that reliably gets read: YouTube truncates the description behind a "show more" toggle at roughly that length on both mobile and desktop, and that same truncated snippet is frequently what appears in a Google or YouTube search results preview, which means a keyword buried in paragraph four of a description that almost nobody expands is functionally invisible to both a human scanning results and, for practical purposes, to a searcher deciding whether to click. Capping keyword repetition at two uses rather than stuffing the phrase repeatedly is a direct response to YouTube's own documented spam and deceptive-practices policy, which explicitly treats excessive, unnatural keyword repetition in titles and descriptions as a policy violation subject to enforcement, not merely a stylistic weakness — this isn't just a readability preference, it's avoiding a categorization YouTube's systems are built to detect. Formatting chapters as literal mm:ss timestamps rather than a prose list matters mechanically: YouTube's player only auto-generates clickable chapter markers and a chapter menu when it detects timestamps in that exact recognized format starting from 0:00, and those chapter titles are also what YouTube surfaces as jump-to-timestamp links directly inside Google search results for well-optimized videos — a chapter titled "Part 2" instead of "Choosing your grind size" throws away a genuine search-visibility opportunity distinct from the description text itself. Ordering links by actual viewer intent rather than by channel-priority habit reflects a real, well-documented click-distribution pattern: engagement drops off sharply the further down a description a link sits, so a channel's Patreon link placed above the specific product a viewer came to find out about is optimizing for the creator's preference at the direct expense of the metric — click-through to the actually relevant link — that the description's structure should be serving first. Limiting hashtags to a small, genuinely relevant set rather than a long stapled-on list avoids a description that reads as obviously optimized-for-algorithm rather than written-for-a-human, which is itself a trust signal viewers pick up on even without being able to name why a description feels spammy.
Verified against
ChatGPT GPT-5.1 · 2026-07-20
Claude Sonnet 4.6 · 2026-07-26
Changelog
- 2026-07-20 — Initial publish, verified against ChatGPT (GPT-5.1) and Claude (Sonnet 4.6).
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