Optimizing Video Content for Youtube Video Sharing - Video SEO
Video sharing and video marketing is becoming one of the newest and most exciting online promotional opportunities for 2008.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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