Youtube Video SEO. How to Optimize Your Videos for Youtube.
Tuesday, May 13th, 2008
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.
YouTube is getting larger and larger with each passing day. It has become one of the most popular destinations on the net. The site does its own Flash conversion that is very tough with regard to digital video garbage handling. Some of the videos on YouTube simply look better than others because they came from better sources. With a little know-how, you can prepare your optimized video for YouTube.
In order to be able to share video online, you need to first have the equipment available to shoot video, capture it, and edit it for online usage. As for cameras, if you dont have a camcorder, most digital cameras, and even some cell phones have video functionality. As for Video editing software, there are many choices for everyone from the beginner to the expert. If you are short on change, most computers already come with tools like Microsoft Moviemaker or Apple iMovie in addition to the literally hundreds of free web-based video tools that you can use online.
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.
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.
It is advisable to make your video as bit-rich as you can. You can use a bit rate around 1000 kbps. Around 1200kbps it would probably overkill and take the video longer to process. 700kbps and 1000kbps should be the ideal range, you should be looking for.
Once you are ready with size, codec, and quality set up, it is time for the selection of your audio format. It is better to use the MP3 audio codec, which should be standard on your editor.
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.
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.
As one final suggestion, definitely allow users to share your videos, comment on them, and rate them. This results in a few things. First, users who rate and comment typically take more action and further drive interest. Second, sometimes users will embed your video which results in a link back to your video such that you will now have a better chance of showing up within the natural search results on 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.
