Youtube Tools: Need help with YOUTUBE?

YouTube is the most popular site to visit for viewing online videos, sharing your favourite videos with people and commenting on videos you like. Recently YouTube was acquired by Google for a few billion dollars. Here is a collection of several YouTube third party tools which enhance your YouTube experience.

YouTube Userscripts - a collection of scripts to perform several tasks with Youtube.

Youtube Video Slideshow - insert a username or a video tag below and it starts a slideshow.

fTube - a YouTube player that downloads the list of 25 most recent videos featured on the YouTube front page. The user can select a video from the list and hit the play button to play it in-Flash.

TubeCH - YouTube help

TvTube - For Mac users. Allows you to browse YouTube, Google Video and Yahoo Videos, for movie clips that people upload, choose your favorite clips and add them to your shared library.

Search The Tube - A quick way to find videos for your website, blog or profile.

YoutubeCrazyVideos - A Youtube videos desktop player. Freeware. 

YouTube Podcaster - makes Podcast feed from your submitted keyword or url. The feed is made up from embedded youtube video IDs and all videos are converted to the MP4 file format.

MemoriesOnWeb - freeware photo slideshow software for YouTube.

Overstream - lets you add subtitles to online videos.

Integrate YouTube Into Your Site / Blog

YouTube badge maker - will show your viewers images of your 6 most recently uploaded videos.

YouTube Wordpress Plugin - Display YouTube videos on your Wordpress blog according to Tags. 

WordPress Related Videos Plugin - Uses tags to look for related videos on YouTube, displays the three most recent related videos on your WordPress blog post and updates videos automatically.

Wordpress Favourite YouTube Videos - Wordpress plugin / widget to display, in a very configurable manner, your latest favorite videos from Youtube.

Viper’s Video Quicktags - WP plugin that easily generates codes for copy / pasting to embed videos from sites like YouTube and Google Video or for self-hosted videos into your posts.

WP-FLV - Wordpress plugin simplfies the process of inserting flash video files (FLV) inside a Wordpress post or page.

TubePress - a highly configurable WordPress plugin that displays YouTube videos in an embedded gallery in posts and/or pages.

Download and Save YouTube Videos

Video Downloader - a firefox extension that allows you to download videos to your computer from YouTube and most video sites. 

TubeSock - grabs YouTube videos from the web and copies them to your video iPod, Mac, or PlayStation Portable.

VideoDL - is a quick AJAX application that allows you to download online video into your computer. It supports top 3 video sites - YouTube, Google Video, and Break.com.

Download YouTube via bookmarklets - A collection of Greasemonkey scripts and bookmarklets to do the job.

Youtube-dl - is a small command-line program to download videos from YouTube.com. It requires the Python interpreter, version 2.4 or later.

GooTube FLV Retriever - enter the video page URL, download the youtube video.

Capture Youtube and Google videos - save them as AVI files encoded in the MPEG4 format, using only one command.

YouRipper - a freeware software which enables you to download videos from the YouTube and Google Video

Save YouTube Videos - paste the youtube video url and download the video.

Top / Best YouTube Videos

PureVideo - collects top 10 videos from around the web
 
The World Internet TV charts - tracks the most popular video clips from four leading Internet TV sites.

Top YouTube Videos - a daily updated selection of the most popular videos from YouTube.

Vidspedia - is a collection of the best Google and YouTube videos, submitted and rated by users.

Youtube top-rated - a coverpop with the 1,001 top rated videos from YouTube updated every week.

Best of YouTube - a blog selecting the best Youtube videos.

Viral Video Chart - tracks the world’s most blogged about videos including GooTube and MySpace.

New websites need links to develop any sort of search engine visibility. Links pointing to a new website can get it indexed and help it to start ranking for low to medium competition long tail keywords.

These keywords will send visitors searching for information on a specific topic to your website and allows you gain a new reader or make some money from whatever affiliate program or ad scheme you are running.

I’ve recently set up several websites for some friends and link building was my main concern because I needed links for the web pages to be indexed and start showing up in the search engine.

15 Link Building Strategies for New Websites

This collection of link building tips are likely to guarantee that you will receive free links from already established websites. This differs from content-oriented development strategies which hope to gradually attract natural editorial links.

These link building tips focus more on targeted link placement or link insertion, whereby you are likely to control the specific anchor text used. Some of them include agreements made with others and others involve one-way action on your part.

Submit your site to Web Directories. This is a pretty monotonous process that can get you several hundred backlinks if you have the time. An alternative would be to hire a manual directory submitter. Here’s a list of web directories you can use. You can also find some blog directories here.

Submit Press Releases to PR sites. A basic press release about your website’s launch can be released to several PR websites, who will distribute it to various online news outlets. A good way to get a free link. I recommend using PRLeap.

Reciprocal Links with Similar Websites. Its important to pick sites that are of high relevance so you’ll not only get links but traffic. Reciprocal linking can be useful from the beginning but don’t overdo it. You can find link partners by emailing them directly or searching through webmaster forums.

Squidoo Lenses.A Squidoo lens is fairly easy to create. It only takes around 15 minutes to set up one fully and you’ll be able to insert a bunch of anchor text links to your website along with your feed content. Hubpages is another similar site you can use.

Article Submissions. Create a short article on your niche topic and submit it to article directories for a backlink and some traffic. You might get more links if your article is picked up and published on other websites. Here is a list of article directories, sorted by Alexa and PageRank.

Social Media Profiles. There a whole bunch of social websites online which allow you to insert a link to your website on the profile page. Sign up for some of them, preferably using a username and avatar that brands your business or you as a person. This might come in useful when you decide to promote your site via the social website in the future.

Social Bookmarking/Voting Websites. Certain social voting websites like Netscape or Digg are often crawled by search engines and their links do help to get a website indexed. 3spots has the biggest list of social voting and bookmarking websites I’ve seen so far.


Forum Signatures. Sign up for some forums in your niche and start contributing to ongoing discussions. Insert a link to the homepage or some inner pages of your site.


Create a Tool, Theme or Widget. Pay a designer to come up with an add-on application or template that is related to a specific social network, popular website or platform. Include a credit link that points back to your designated website.


Blogs on Other Blog Platforms. Use existing blogs you have on other blog networks. Or set up different versions of your blog on different blog networks like Wordpress.com, Blogger and Xanga. Link to specific webpages on your website.


Comment on Other Blogs. Start commenting on relevant and popular sites in your niche. Don’t just spam for links but focus on building a relationship with other bloggers as well. Write a relevant comment and try to avoid using keyword names or signature links.


Guest posting on other blogs. Like article and press releases, this one involves having readily available content you can send out to certain blogs in your niche. This is great for getting relevant links and traffic.


Collaborative Projects. You may need to develop an article specifically for a writing project, blog carnival or meme but it will usually get you a couple of backlinks, depending on the number and generosity of the participants involved.


Offer your Expertise. This will apply if you have a specific skill set such as web design, copywriting, translation or SEO. Write to an established website and offer to revamp/optimize their website in return for a mention or credit link on a webpage. This offers excellent branding, particularly if your offer is picked up by a website with a decent audience.

This list is by no means comprehensive but are just some of the off-site methods I use to build links for very new websites. After I get a bunch of links, I’ll usually focus on niche networking and the development of exceptional content that’ll help to rapidly build a readership.