I have been asked numerous times as to the best way to caption YouTube videos hence this blog post. When I initially started to caption videos, I used the ever popular MAGpie software but found that captioning YouTube videos proved to be extremely tedious with MAGpie. Fortunately, there are a number of free tools available on the web that makes the captioning process a whole lot easier. Below is a review of the tool that I use CaptionTube:

CaptionTube

It has taken a while but Google have finally come up with their own tool for adding YouTube captions. Unfortunately it does not integrate with YouTube as fluidly as we may want it to but neverthless works efficiently as a caption editor once you get past the learning curve. It allows you to connect directly to your YouTube account and have access to your videos within CaptionTube. Once the captions are created though, you will need to export the file and then upload the file to your YouTube account, this is where the fluidity is lost. Add a functionality to automatically add the caption to the YouTube video and I think we are on to a winner app. CaptionTube is what I used to caption the LSBU YouTube videos

Screenshot of captiontube

Other tools that I have found useful include:

• Subtitle Horse
• dotSub
• Easy YouTube caption creator

Search Engine Optimization

I came across this little gem of a document while search engine optimizing digitocrat.com and know others will find this document extremely useful.

http://www.google.com/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf (PDF 550KB – Opens in a new window)

The guide does clearly state that it won’t tell you any secrets that’ll automatically rank your site first
for queries in Google, but it does share best practices that will make it easier for search engines to both crawl and index your content.

So no more excuses as to why you cant get your head around SEO.