Video - onsite or hosted on toutube?

[jezsez]

Hi, I keep hearing google likes video. What is the best way to serve video though? Should it be onsite or is it OK to host on youtube? Are there any other factors to consider, other than bandwidth and server issue of onsite hosting?

Thanks in advance.

[LD]

For me, bandwidth is a factor. I also like having more control over a video rather than dealing with what Youtube gives us. Hey, it's free there so they do what they've got to do.

Back on track - I've got clients with tiny video frames that are huge, in terms of file size eating up bandwidth that everyone else pays for. From now on though, I recommend off-site video hosting for a couple reasons. Firstly, it resolves or softens bandwidth issues, but places like Vimeo also give you a customized player which is fairly easy to configure and use. Reasonable cost as well.

[jezsez]

For me, bandwidth is a factor. I also like having more control over a video rather than dealing with what Youtube gives us. Hey, it's free there so they do what they've got to do.

Back on track - I've got clients with tiny video frames that are huge, in terms of file size eating up bandwidth that everyone else pays for. From now on though, I recommend off-site video hosting for a couple reasons. Firstly, it resolves or softens bandwidth issues, but places like Vimeo also give you a customized player which is fairly easy to configure and use. Reasonable cost as well.

Does either make any difference with google? If it means a slight boost in karma or whatever if I host it myself then I will do that if not youtube will be fine. I will have a look at vimeo too. Thanks for that.

[GooglePluser]

When Google Bot crawls the website it looks for the quality content, relevance and keywords. When the bot gets the multimedia objects on the webpage, these multimedia objects gives the strength to the quality of the webpage. Besides this having video on the page increases the time spent of your visitors on your page. The high average time spent is also one of the important indicator for Google. Google Now Indexing URLs with Embedded YouTube Videos. But you need to know how to embed youtube video on your site. You need to know some schema.org codes. You can check all these info on this link. reelseo. com/embedded-youtube-indexed-google

[LD]

Does either make any difference with google? If it means a slight boost in karma or whatever if I host it myself then I will do that if not youtube will be fine. I will have a look at vimeo too. Thanks for that.

Here's a WPW forum link just for Video SEO I think you might find some interesting topics and threads there that may help you.

[jezsez]

Here's a WPW forum link just for (url snipped) I think you might find some interesting topics and threads there that may help you.

Thanks for the info both of you. I have only put one informational video on the site but it's on every page so some of the SEO tips are redundant as it isn't highly targeted to every page but it does cover most topics the site does (in the video metadata). I have gone with youtube for now but may move it at some point.


Thanks again.

[deepsand]

When Google Bot crawls the website it looks for the quality content, relevance and keywords. When the bot gets the multimedia objects on the webpage, these multimedia objects gives the strength to the quality of the webpage. Besides this having video on the page increases the time spent of your visitors on your page. The high average time spent is also one of the important indicator for Google.

Setting aside the fact that bots don't look at anything, that's the job of the indexing engine, the mere presence of "multimedia objects" is not an indicator of quality and/or relevance.

As for time-on-page, absence the presence of on-page GA/Urchin scripting, Google has no way of measuring such.

[william.alvarez]

This is the most complete and updated guide I've read so far: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/hosting-a...-for-video-seo

[claybutler]

I think the question is missing the point. The only questions are:

1. Is my video useful to my users or target audience?
2. Should I take on the burden of hosting it my server or have YouTube or Vimeo handle the heavy lifting?

To me, it's a no brainer to host offsite and embed the player code on my site. No only does that take care of the server load issues, it also allows you to tap into a huge ecosystem of users and sharing tools. Fortune 500 companies don't even host their videos that often, they mostly post them on YouTube. That should tell you something.

All the worry about SEO benefit, and what Google likes, is completely missing the larger issues.

[jannmirch]

Hosting on YouTube also allows you to tap into one of the most used search engines - YouTube!