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 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.

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.

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.

The video should be set to the YouTube recommended size of 320240 QVGA. Your camera may have shot the video at a different aspect ratio than the 320240. So be prepared for some exercise but do not stretch or pull 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.

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 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.

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 to you and your video sharing success.