Optimizing Video Content For Youtube Video Sharing – Video Seo
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.