Youtube Video SEO. How to Optimize Your Videos for Youtube.
Video sharing and video marketing is becoming one of the newest and most exciting online promotional opportunities for 2008.
The most popular website online for online video is YouTube. This video sharing giant has fast become the default website for users to learn about online video sharing, how to upload videos, and how to market videos online. However, it is important that you learn a few techniques to optimize your video so that when you upload it, it results in the best possible quality video. Youtube converts videos to Flash on the fly and in doing so, it compresses the video and has difficulty processing digital garbage. With a little bit of technique, you can optimize your videos for prime-time.
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.
Of all the free tools out there, I would suggest that you use something other than Microsoft Movie Maker as it will give you more difficulty when trying to edit videos from a mobile phone source. Quicktime is nice with almost all formats.
YouTube only supports certain formats for input, so be cautious. It is better if you make a .mov or .mp4, so be sure your editor has the capability to handle that format efficiently. If the software that you have is not capable of doing so, find one that it because otherwise you may loose information from the video during upload.
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.
As for audio, it is advisable to utilize the MP3 codec, which should be standard on most video editing software programs.
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.
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.
Good luck video sharing on youtube. I would also suggest trying some of the various other sites out there.
Tagged with: Online Marketing
Filed under: Online Marketing
