Youtube Video Seo. How To Optimize Your Videos For Youtube.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Take the output of your video file as .mov or .mp4 and before you move further it is time to have the preview of your video file. It should look nice. If you are satisfied with the outcome, go ahead with uploading your video.

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.

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.