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Using YouTube videos on your website or blog, whether yours or someone else’s, is a great idea for helping fill out your site and get more traffic. The following tips provide best practices for using YouTube videos on your website, as well as reasons why you should (plus some advice on recent changes).
Save Your Bandwidth
When you use YouTube to host videos, you save an enormous amount of money on bandwidth and secure hosting services. It will be impossible to use shared hosting when you host your own videos, so using YouTube for hosting is a winner right out of the box.
Deliverability Is Higher
When using YouTube to host your videos, you will not have to worry about whether or not your audience can view your videos on multiple devices. Your audience also will not have to download anything. They’ll just be able to watch how they like watching.
Provide Commentary and Embed Others’ Videos
Don’t just embed someone’s video without making some sort of commentary on the blog post about what’s inside the video. Add your thoughts about the video before showing it, and add some commentary after the video also. Also, only use video that belongs to someone else if embedding is allowed. Then, let them know you loved their video and shared it on your site. More often than not, they’ll promote your post or page to their followers which will bring more traffic back to your site.
Embed Your Own Videos
When you publish a video on YouTube, automatically embed it into your blog, on a blog post scheduled for whenever you normally schedule that type of content. By embedding it in your blog, and providing commentary as instructed above for other people’s videos, you’ll increase viewership exponentially.
Don’t Set the Video to Autoplay
As of May 2018, YouTube videos no longer work on autoplay. If you don’t embed your videos with the controls on, you might as well not embed it at all. Now’s the time to go check all your videos and change them to include the controls. See the video below on why this is important:
Include Snippets
If you see a video that had a point you want to expand on, and that allows embedding, then embed only that part of the video. The system provided by YouTube allows you to choose when to start and end the snippet. Provide your commentary and content in the text surrounding the share of this video content. It can be a great catalyst for a blog post. You can even do this with your own videos, giving an added boost to videos already shared.
Choose the Right Location
On your website, you probably have different categories of content. Ensure that when you start adding video that you create a category for video, and also subcategories to enable your audience to find the video they want to watch easily based on the topic or subject.
Notify Audience That a Video Is Included
Putting it in the title of your blog post (as I did with this post) will enable your audience to know that when they click through they’ll see a video. This is useful for many reasons, but one is that search engines like video and apparently so do people. So, if you want that post to rank higher, let everyone know that a video is included.
One Video Per Page
One thing you need to be concerned with when it comes to using video on your website or blog is page speed. Putting too many videos on a page can not only slow page load speed but also it will confuse your audience. Using one at a time will ensure that focus is maintained.
As you become accustomed to using YouTube to host your videos on and off your page and use the content that YouTube and its members offer to the public, you’ll be able to enhance your website and/or blog in ways you never thought possible. Need help with embedding YouTube videos properly? Reach out and let’s chat!
