YouTube is being utilized more and more by everyone from celebrities to bloggers to social media enthusiasts. It’s regularly integrated into marketing plans for companies developing their web-marketing plans, and can be utilized as a powerful community-building tool, as well as a great way to enhance blog content.

WordPress is usually pretty good about displaying YouTube videos properly, but there are some themes who butt heads with YouTube embedding, which makes adding a simple plugin a necessity.

Whether its purpose is to display videos properly, or to optimize your blog and add enhancing features to your content, these plugins offer high functionality when integrating YouTube into your WordPress blog.

Smart YouTube
Smart YouTube is all about optimization. It allows you to display full, embedded YouTube videos into your RSS feed where there might otherwise be a blank space, causing confusion and frustration for your subscribers. In addition to that important function, it also optimizes your embedded YouTube videos for iPod/iPhone, and adding mobile capability is crucial in the ever-developing world of mobile technology. You can also embed playlists, HD videos and deep link (which allows you to start the video from a specified point, instead of instructing your readers to start at 1:03, or something similar).

YouTube Brackets
Never underestimate the power of a basic plugin. YouTube Brackets does exactly what you think it does – it allows you to place a YouTube URL in brackets, which automatically displays the embedded video on publish. This saves time and frustration surrounding the sometimes fickle HTML embed codes that YouTube offers.

WP YouTube
This plugin takes things just a step further than YouTube brackets by allowing you to only acquire the video id (i.e. Z5ErKq4o4sQ) and place it between brackets. Additionally, WP YouTube gives you the option to set a color for the video box that will remain consistent throughout your posts, designate auto-play, size, and whether or not to include related videos.

TubePress
This is so much more than just a YouTube plugin – this is for the serious YouTube blogger or aggregation website developer. TubePress develops galleries of YouTube videos based on criteria that you specify – be it the top rated videos, the favorites of a specific user or users, search terms, most-viewed videos, mobile-ready videos, most discussed, etc… The options are endless. On top of that, TubePress lets you designate how your videos are played. You can use the default YouTube player, or JW FLV Media Player and control the size and color of the video embed, as well. There are filters available to make sure that your content remains safe for work (or not), and remains open source for full customizing capabilities. Considering all of these features come free with the basic form of the plugin, it’s worth mentioning that the “pro” version (only $10) offers AJAX-based pagination, use of the galleries as a PHP library, and more options for video players.