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Saturday, February 9, 2008

Optimizing Video Content For Youtube Video Sharing - Video Seo

By Mark Robertson

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.

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.

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.

When exporting your video, I would recommend exporting to the Youtube recommended size, which is 320x240. Most video cameras and camcorders shoot video at much higher resolutions so you will likely need to compress and resize your video to the aspect ratio of 320*240. If you are using a webcam, sometimes the video exported directly from the webcam is ready to go.

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.

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.

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.

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 engine optimization, it is always important to know the keywords and phrases that are most relevant to both your content and of course, your target audience. You will want to be certain that you include these words and phrases within the video title, description, and tags. It is also important that you choose the most appropriate category on Youtube to submit your video to.

Choose and appropriate but popular category to post your video in and allow users to post comments, ratings, and embed your video elsewhere as this attracts incoming links to your video page on Youtube and provides you with the opportunity to show up in the Google search results as a result of their universal search initiative and purchase of Youtube.

Good luck video sharing on youtube. I would also suggest trying some of the various other sites out there.

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