I'm using premiere CS4. Looking for any tips on maximizing my encoding for youtube.

thanks

I haven't played around with encoding for YouTube, but I did for Vimeo. I used to use h.264 but CS3 and Windows 7 developed some weird artifacts. Plus YouTube had some strange frame rate issues and thought that the video was twice as long as it actually was. Switched to Flash and the On2 codec and the problem disappeared.

Quality and data rate are directly related so keep the data rate as high as practical, but you probably already knew that.