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.

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.

Obviously you need to first determine the camera and video editing software that you will be using. Know the format of video you are starting with. Most digital cameras today shoot video, as do most phones, which is a great cheap way to start. It is irrelevant where your video comes from; the responsibility lies on you to make it breathtaking. There are tons of editing tools on the Internet available for anyone to use on almost any platform; the latest computers already have these tools along with the basic install for just such editing requirements.

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.

Keep in mind that Youtube only offers support for some of the various video formats that are out there. If possible, I would suggest either a .mov or mp4 file as the file that you upload to Youtube. If the software that you have is not capable of handling export functions in these formats, then I would suggest trying something else.

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.

When discussing which quality, or bit-rate, ideally you will be targeting a final file with a bit rate of 700-1000. I would suggest using 1000kbps, but anything higher is almost a waste as it does not result in much better quality and takes much more time to process.

Now that we have covered the size, quality, codecs, etc… what about audio? The best choice for the audio format is for you to choose the MP3 codec which most video editing software programs should have as a default setting option.

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.

After your video is uploaded to the servers of YouTube it can take up to an hour or so to get actually published on the site. As YouTube formats your file and encodes it for their flash streaming. This process is fully automatic. Now all of your efforts would produce a real gem a really optimized video that looks better than others.

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.

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.

Related posts:

1. Overview of Online Video Advertising Formats
2. Micro Niche Finder – Get noticed in Google