Youtube Video Seo. How To Optimize Your Videos For Youtube.
Mark Robertson
Online video has finally hit prime-time. In 2008, video marketing and video sharing is the newest and most exciting field of online promotional marketing.
Certainly we have all heard about the biggest online video sharing website out there, Youtube. In 2007, Google purchased Youtube and even before this acquisition, the site was growing in popularity each and every day. Youtube is a wonderful site for users to get started with sharing online video content. However, because your video is converted to flash upon uploading it to the website, you need to learn the tips and techniques that will optimize your videos for the best quality result after uploading to the site.
Obviously you need to first determine the camera and video editing software that you will be using. Know the format of video you are starting with. Most digital cameras today shoot video, as do most phones, which is a great cheap way to start. It is irrelevant where your video comes from; the responsibility lies on you to make it breathtaking. There are tons of editing tools on the Internet available for anyone to use on almost any platform; the latest computers already have these tools along with the basic install for just such editing requirements.
While Microsoft MovieMaker is a great introductory program for video editing, it does not do well with videos that are created using a mobile phone. If you are going to capture video from a cameraphone for use on youtube, I would suggest getting Quicktime Pro from Apple. This is a very inexpensive upgrade and can handle conversion in multiple formats.
It is important to note that youtube does not support all of the many many different video formats that are available, and for good reason. However, as a result, you should try to utilize a format such as mp4 or even mov. Most video editing software will support this but if yours does not, I would suggest downloading another program.
The video should be set to the YouTube recommended size of 320240 QVGA. Your camera may have shot the video at a different aspect ratio than the 320240. So be prepared for some exercise but do not stretch or pull the frames.
When discussing which quality, or bit-rate, ideally you will be targeting a final file with a bit rate of 700-1000. I would suggest using 1000kbps, but anything higher is almost a waste as it does not result in much better quality and takes much more time to process.
Now that we have covered the size, quality, codecs, etc... what about audio? The best choice for the audio format is for you to choose the MP3 codec which most video editing software programs should have as a default setting option.
After you have your final video file, presumably in mov or mp4 format, you should clearly preview the video and make sure that you are happy with the outcome and the resulting quality. Once satisfied, go ahead and upload your video to Youtube.
Your video, depending on the speed of your internet connection, will take some time to upload and often several minutes. Once it is uploaded and resides on Youtube servers, they automatically compress and encode your video into an flv flash file. If you followed the suggestions for optimizing your video, your result should look much better than some others on Youtube.
For Video SEO purposes, you need to make sure that you include the most relevant keywords and phrases in your title, description, and keyword tags. This is the only way that you will be able to attract the audience that you are hoping for.
Choose and appropriate but popular category to post your video in and allow users to post comments, ratings, and embed your video elsewhere as this attracts incoming links to your video page on Youtube and provides you with the opportunity to show up in the Google search results as a result of their universal search initiative and purchase of Youtube.
Good luck to you and your video sharing success.
For a comprehensive list of video sharing sites like YouTube, visit ReelSEO.com, the expert resource for online video search engine optimization information.
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