Youtube Video Seo. How To Optimize Your Videos For Youtube.
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by: MarkRobertson
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Video sharing and video marketing is becoming one of the newest and most exciting online promotional opportunities for 2008.
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 the first step is to have video content created in order to then share the video online. To do this, you will need the equipment in order to shoot video, edit, and encode video. If you do not currently have a camcorder or other video camera, most digital cameras these days, and even some mobile phones, have video functionality built in. In addition, you can use a simple webcam to produce videos. As far as software for editing and encoding your videos, there are hundreds of choices. Even the basic video software that come with most new computers have the tools that you will need.
If you are planning to upload and make movies from your mobile phone or other mobile device, I would plan on using something other than Microsoft MovieMaker. Apple Quicktime Pro, which is very inexpensive, is good to use with most any format.
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.
As for the size of your video, Youtube recommends 320*240 QVGA and I would also agree with this recommendation which, unless you are using a webcam, most often your camcorders will shoot at a higher resolution. You will need to resize the video but try not to effectively pull or stretch the frames.
As far as the bit-rate, I would suggest that you use a higher bit rate than YouTube recommends. You can target your bit-rate to be 1000kbps and anything much higher than 1500kbps would really be more than you need and will clearly make the conversion process take longer. Ideally you are looking for a range of 700-1000 kbps.
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.
When you are done editing and exporting your video as a .mov or as a .mp4 format, you would obviously want to preview the video and make certain that it meets your standards for quality. If your resulting project is OK by you, go ahead and upload your video to Youtube.
After your video is uploaded to the servers of YouTube it can take up to an hour or so to get actually published on the site. As YouTube formats your file and encodes it for their flash streaming. This process is fully automatic. Now all of your efforts would produce a real gem a really optimized video that looks better than others.
In terms of video search optimization, remember to use all the tag and description fields. For your video to be found by searchers, the correct keywords must be in all three of the following: (a) the title (b) the keyword tags, and (c) the description. So the typed components (as listed above) need to be keyword rich to attract the right viewers, rather than a random selection of those who are there to see what's new.
Also choose an appropriate and hopefully highly viewed category. Finally, allow users to rate, comment, and share your video with others as this generates buzz and often results in external sites linking to your video on Youtube. If this happens, you will have a better chance to be seen in the organic search results of Google.
All of these suggestions should help you with your video sharing future. I would also suggest reading ReelSEO as it is the primary resource for online video SEO. Finally, try some of the other video sharing websites out there, like blip.tv and revver. Good luck.
About the Author
For a comprehensive list of video sharing sites like YouTube, visit ReelSEO.com, the expert resource for Video SEO and video search engine marketing.
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