The Pros and Cons of YouTube
Everyone has heard of YouTube. The reason each of us create a channel on YouTube is different. Some might be for fun, to watch or to post vids. Others for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) or SEM Search Engine Marketing) to get their product or service seen.
Google loves videos on YouTube and we LOVE that Google Loves them. All the better for us that know how to utilize YouTube for such purposes. There are several Pros to putting your videos there. When done right the videos get ranked with our short and longtail keywords. It creates a link to the webpage we are driving traffic to (if we put it in there). And wouldnt we all love our videos to go viral. And if we allow our video to be embeded others can put it on their website or blog bringing more traffic. Oh and we can’t forget da, da,dada (drumroll) Free hosting! Yes we all LOVE FREE. However this wonderful pro can also be a con or a downside. How? Good Question!
The downside comes when we use the code from YouTube to embed on our own site. We have all seen this done on websites. What happens when the video is over? A bunch of links come up taking our viewers away from our page and back to Youtube and to other videos like ours but not OURS. This takes our potential customers away from us. It’s true you can click on the setting button when you get the code you can unclick the show related video. However it can still be problematic. Another issue is the length limit of the videos. If you want to put up a video longer than 10 minutes you will have to split it in to separate segments.
We work hard on our videos and websites so when someone lands on our page we need to keep them there. Finding a place to host your videos isnt that hard. If you have figured out how to edit and upload a video to YouTube you can host your own videos for prices that are quite low.
The best and most cost effective way to host your videos where you don’t have to worry about bandwith is Amazon. To sign up for it you just need to go to http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/. There are a few more steps involved but, to me its worth it to keep all yourown traffic on your site. You need to convert your videos to flash which there are several really good one click converters out there that will convert your video and give you your choice of video players. They give you the code you need to embed your video and player on your site. You just need to put the video on Amazon and the best way to do that is with the firefox S3 plugin. And belive it or not there is a video on YouTube that shows you how to set it up. Here it is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvigljxXqsk .
Again YouTube is GREAT!!! Upload all of your videos to your channel share them, tweet them and Facebook them point them all to your site or blog. But if you can host your own videos for your own website and keep your taffic on your page.
Tags: Video Marketing, Video SEO, Youtube Video
