Add a caption track to Youtube video

We all want to get more viewers for our videos and one of the ways that you can do something to help your videos be found within YouTube, is to add a caption track. You will have already chosen a good title and added a good description to help the search engines find your videos. Now you can supercharge the search engine optimisation of your YouTube videos by adding more text that a search engine will just love with a captions track.

How to add a caption track to a YouTube video

It is quite possible to add a caption track actually on the YouTube site, You don’t necessarily need closed captioning software. On the YouTube site it works fairly well and can be done reasonably quickly. There is a machine created closed captions track that will have been created automatically, but it will be complete nonsense and gobbledygook. If you are lucky there will be one or two sentences that it will have done the speech to text conversion that make any sense. Most times though you will need to rewrite the sentences completely. Or dictate them in using DragonDictate , which is my preferred way of creating YouTube closed captions.

Using the application ScreenFlow 4 to write your YouTube closed captions track

There is a new feature in ScreenFlow, in the latest version which has just been released, for creating a closed caption track. What it does is to split up the timeline into small sections and into each of the sections you put your caption text. You can type directly into a text entry box, you can paste the text in there or you can do as I do and that is to dictate. I like to use DragonDictate on my computer as much as possible, so that I can lean back in my chair, put my feet up and talk to the computer. So far it hasn’t started to talk back to me, well that is not quite true, if you count the text to speech that is available on Mac OS X.

 

 

Youtube closed captioning with ScreenFlow 4

In the video I show you how you can extend the length of a section, so that it fits with the actual audio is on the video. It is a simple action of holding down the command key and using the up arrow to make it longer and the down arrow to make it shorter. So far, with the videos that I have created closed caption tracks for, it has worked fairly well and has been very easy to use. I have found that it is slightly more comfortable and therefore faster using ScreenFlow to do this job, than it is to do the same job on the YouTube website.

Get more video views on YouTube by using closed captioning software

So there you go you have some tips now on how to add a closed-captioned YouTube track. The text that you have created is another way for Google and YouTube to find your videos and pass them onto new viewers that are searching on the search engines. You can easily use specialised closed captioning software that made specially to do that job. On the other hand if you have ScreenFlow which is a very good Mac video screen capture application , you can use version 4 to make your YouTube closed captions. Then if you don’t want to spend any money, it is perfectly viable to create a caption track on the YouTube website.

Is it worth adding closed captions on YouTube?

Now that I have over 230 videos on YouTube, it would be rather tedious to go back and add captions to all of those. Even if I used the best close to captioning software available. What I may do with the videos that I have uploaded already, is to look at the ones that are most popular and at a caption tracks to those. At the moment, the YouTube videos I have that are most popular are the ones about how to add movies to iTunes and the videos showing how to add review questions to iBooks author . If you’re wondering if it is worth the effort in adding YouTube closed captions, then I would say yes, especially if you can use closed caption software and DragonDictate.