Best way to host video?
-
Hi,
We are planning to host videos on our site for the first time. It looks like YouTube is a bit too over focused on ads these days for commercial use, can anyone recommend any better video hosting services?
I also realize that hosting somewhere like YouTube has little SEO benefit, am I better off hosting them on our site if possible?
Please share your experiences with the various services and methods of hosting.
Thanks
-
I think meaning that it may not endorse different films after your video has completed playing. You will possibly nevertheless have all the ads shooting up during the video though which is not ideal. like you can see here on the amazon gift card website.
-
Update from April 2012 -but the content in this post stands http://www.seomoz.org/blog/hosting-and-embedding-for-video-seo
-
Interesting, any update for June 2012? Just about to do this.
-
No problem Keri!
-
Thanks for the great answer Phil! It'll serve as a great reference answer. We've had several questions come through along these lines over the past few months.
-
Thanks Robert, Glad you found it useful!
If you want a bit more detail on some video stuff, I have written a couple of longer posts around the topic:
http://www.distilled.net/blog/social-media/youtube/creating-awesome-videos-for-seo/
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/getting-stuff-done-by-video
and Dave Sottimano put together a good guide for YouTube optimisation earlier in the year:
http://www.distilled.net/blog/social-media/youtube/youtube-seo/
Hopefully they might help your endeavours too.
-
Phil,
This is one of the most concise, well written docs on video streaming and the Internet I have seen. Frankly, I am sending it to several of my staff and I will re-read it several times as well. On the ads, the problem is not that they are there - it is that many clients freak out when they see a competitor show up at the end when they have placed the YouTube feed on their site to run their commercial. Frankly, If not for that, we would do more with it and some clients when informed ahead of time have no problem.
Thanks for a well written answer that went above and beyond.
Robert
-
Great, thanks Phil
-
No, it's actually the other way around. Check out http://www.youtube.com/distilledseo to see what i've done with Distilled's channel.
If you go into your YouTube account settings page http://www.youtube.com/account_manage then scroll down, there is an option to "allow adverts" or "do not allow adverts". choosing the second option will prevent pop-ups and other adsThe pop-ups are essentially PPC ads and only appear for accounts which have high enough views to be offered monetization. YouTube default settings do not have pop-up ads, you have to explicitly allow them.
-
I think that means that it won't recommend other videos after your video has finished playing. You will probably still have all the ads popping up during the video though which is not ideal.
-
Vimeo offer a great service, but be aware that the original focus of vimeo was a creative content, rather than a commercial service and so they don't allow you to upload anything blatantly commercial or marketing focussed unless you pay for the pro package, which is a relatively inexpensive $199 per year. If you have something nicely designed and artistic though (even if it is a bit commercial in nature), you may get away with it.
I wouldn't be so down on YouTube because of the ads. Its very easy to embed YouTube videos on your site, the content is mobile friendly and you can choose whether or not to allow adverts on any of your videos. Plus, YouTube gets indexed very quickly and you can optimise your content for search within the platform to achieve greater overall exposure. YouTube also has very smart variable bit-rate progressive encoding, so the service is excellent if you have very high-definition content but want people to be able to watch it without spending any time buffering on low bandwidth connections. The main downside to YouTube is it's security and that ads for other videos will come up in the embedded player on your site after your video has finished playing.
If you want to maintain a fully branded and corporate feel or secure you video from privacy, services like Wistia, Brightcove and Vzaar are all very good and simple to use, though will charge you for hosting based on bandwidth use. Wistia is particularly good because it submits sitemaps on your behalf which can aid you in getting blended results for your videos.
Alternatively, if you have the time and resources, then you could build your own HTML5 player and host the content on your own servers or through a cloud system like Amazon Web Services. There are some plugins and free apps which claim to assist with this, but i haven't tried any of them out.
The question which will ultimately define the answer to your initial query is "What am I trying to achieve with this video?" If you just want pure exposure, then i would host it on YouTube, embed the content on your site, submit a sitemap and optimise both the YouTube page and the page on your site for the same target keyword. If you want something to simply enrich your own website, but lock down the content to ensure any video views happen on your own site (which is what you want to do if your focus is link-building and referrals) then i would pay out the money for a service like Brightcove or Wistia.
-
I was looking at a youtube account. When video is embedded, options exist to not show display related video options at the end of the video. This seems to imply that you can have youtube videos on a website without ads. Am I seeing something wrong?
-
I am looking for this solution as well. Looking at Wistia right now. Not sure how it compares to the other options.
-
If you use Vimeo, you may still want to put videos on Youtube. This will get you increased exposure through Youtube when viewers look at competitors videos.
-
Another vote for Vimeo, its fast to load videos and really easy to use.
-
Both Vimeo and Viddler are good options. Each have pro/cons depending on your needs. Most times I lean towards Vimeo, I think their user experience is easier and their organization of content is nicer.
-
We use Vimeo for many of our clients with local business due to the ads that follow on YouTube. To our local business clients, when they have a video piece on the site and it ends and the option is there to pick a video from their competitor......well, it is not a good option usually.
If we are not as concerned with the ads that trail using the YouTube feed, we will go ahead with the it but let the client make the choice.Hope this helps.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Embed video. YouTube or Vimeo ? Whats best for the pagespeed ?
Hello, We want to add video to our website.
Image & Video Optimization | | WayneRooney
We are not sure if to embed it from YouTube or Vimeo. Do you guys know whats best that will not hurt the pagespeed of the site ? Thank you0 -
Video Schema needs a 2nd opinion
I added a video on one of my client pages via html5, added the video schema to the URL, and submitted a video sitemap and the video still isn't showing up a week later in the SERPs. The keyword I'm typing in is a keyword that DOES trigger video results, so I'm wondering if I screwed something up and would like a second opinion. Search Query that should trigger the video: https://www.google.com/search?q=clinton+township+silverado+1500&oq=clinton+township+silverado+1500&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i60.3798j0j7&sourceid=chrome&espv=210&es_sm=93&ie=UTF-8 Actual page URL: (html5 video at bottom) http://www.moranchevrolet.com/models/chevrolet-silverado1500 Video Sitemap URL: http://www.moranchevrolet.com/video_sitemap.xml I've added videos in the past via the Wistia automatic schema/sitemap generators and it worked, but via the html5 setup its a little different (like no embed). However, the video appears to check out just fine via the Google schema validator tool. Please let me know if you see anything that doesn't look right. Thanks
Image & Video Optimization | | Cobalt0 -
Local Search Clean up Done. Now Best Way to Index?
I have spent hours doing some local search clean up and have a list of all the URLs to index, about 75. Is there a place I can dump these to get them all indexed quickly or do I have to wait for the hand of Google to come down and bless me with indexing. I don't want to dump all these to Google +, Facebook, or Twitter; that would just be wrong. Any ideas for fast indexing. I want them to all get indexed before the business address changes in a couple years 🙂
Image & Video Optimization | | photoseo10 -
Local SEO Best Practice
Hi We currently have 6 showrooms in a geographical area (Scotland,UK) and each showroom covers a specific region within the country encompassing towns and cities. So for example showroom A based in Edinburgh covers a customer area of Edinburgh, Fife, St Andrews while showroom B located in Glasgow covers Glasgow, Livingston etc In google places I have drawn the geographical area on the map that each showroom covers making sure that they do not overlap At present some of which are ranking well in local but one is stating that 'google does not support this location' and after following previous advice on the forum this is still the case. Would I be better setting up another google account for this showroom and submit it again into Google Places or would it be better going into Google+ business pages? or are they the same thing? Finally is it worth using the following in Google Places? KML File and Geo Sitemap generation (these files are needed for Google) Address output in Schema.org format
Image & Video Optimization | | ocelot0 -
Vimeo Pro, video SEO and rich snippets
Hi All, we are producing product demonstration videos. One major aim with these videos is to help our rankings for these specific product pages and associated keywords... and to get rich snippets displayed on Google results pages against our listing. We have used schema.org markup in the product pages body code along with / next to the embed vimeo video code on the product page in order to hopefully get us rich snippet listing... we used schema.org markup as this seems to be the main current markup for rich snippets we have hosted the video via Vimeo Pro so that it is served quickly and not affected by speed of our hosting server or any possible bandwidth issues on our hosting server and ensure sthat the traffic comes to our site pages rather then Youtube or similar Vimeo Privacy settings for the video have been set so that we have not allowed it to be embed anywhere except for our own domain and the video is not displayed on Vimeo.com to ensure that the video is not duplicated anywhere else... so that this is unique content on our own site for maximum value for our domain We have used the "old code" from Vimeo Pro for embedding the video on our product page rather than the current iframe code as from what i understand Google cant follow very well and doesn't necessarily trust content displayed in iframes. Video and schema.org markup code used is on product page is: <div itemprop="<a class="attribute-value">video</a>" itemscope itemtype="<a class="attribute-value">http://schema.org/VideoObject</a>"> <p ><strong>Watch our <span itemprop="<a class="attribute-value">name</a>">Click 7 Lite Duo demonstrationspan>:strong>p> <meta itemprop="<a class="attribute-value">thumbnailURL</a>" content="<a class="attribute-value">http://www.3wisemonkeys.co.uk/img/products/nextbase-click-7-lite-duo-thumb.jpg</a>" /> <meta itemprop="<a class="attribute-value">duration</a>" content="<a class="attribute-value">T2M23S</a>" /> <span itemprop="<a class="attribute-value">description</a>">A product demonstration showing what's included in the box when you buy a Click 7 Lite Duospan>...:<br /> <p align="<a class="attribute-value">center</a>"> p> <p align="<a class="attribute-value">center</a>"><object width="<a class="attribute-value">500</a>" height="<a class="attribute-value">281</a>"><param name="<a class="attribute-value">allowfullscreen</a>" value="<a class="attribute-value">true</a>" /><param name="<a class="attribute-value">allowscriptaccess</a>" value="<a class="attribute-value">always</a>" /><param name="<a class="attribute-value">movie</a>" value="<a class="attribute-value">http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=67392721&force_embed=1&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=1&color=00adef&fullscreen=1&autoplay=0&loop=0</a>" /><embed src="[http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=67392721&force_embed=1&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=1&color=00adef&fullscreen=1&autoplay=0&loop=0](view-source:http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=67392721&force_embed=1&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=1&color=00adef&fullscreen=1&autoplay=0&loop=0)" type="<a class="attribute-value">application/x-shockwave-flash</a>" allowfullscreen="<a class="attribute-value">true</a>" allowscriptaccess="<a class="attribute-value">always</a>" width="<a class="attribute-value">500</a>" height="<a class="attribute-value">281</a>">embed>object> p> div> Page this code is used on: http://www.3wisemonkeys.co.uk/proddet.jsp?id=2016&cat=1 Could anyone confirm whether the above seems to be what we need to do / should be doing to get the most value from these videos for helping our web site rank better with Google / search engine results pages as well as getting rich snippets displayed? Lastly does the above code seem correct and include all the necessaries for rich snippets? Thanks for any pointers.
Image & Video Optimization | | jasef0 -
CTR of Video Rich Snippet vs. Normal SERP
Hi there, We were ranking no. 1 for one of our key terms for a long time, however a competitor of ours by the looks of it purchased a load of private blog network links and managed to shift above us. The page we rank for on that term has a video with the markup to trigger a video box rich snippet (which i've noticed never seems to be given on position 1 but can be for 2 and below) - so that is now what our entry in the SERPs is. Since then we have actually dropped down to 3rd, with the web page now being in 2nd not having any new links / content in a very long time. Therefore I was wondering if anyone had any ideas about whether the video box could actually reduce CTR which could have resulted in us dropping down to 3rd ? The meta description text seems to be reduced to 100 characters with the vid box, so we're not getting our full message across where the others in the results are. My natural assumption would be that the video box would gain a higher CTR, but i'm thinking this may not be the case for us. Does anyone know of any data relating to the video box in the SERPS ? Many thanks, Stuart MtsbA.jpg
Image & Video Optimization | | stukerr0 -
Schema or Google Video Sitemap
Hey. I have a few hundred pages with videos on them. I want to have rich snippets with the thumbnail and such in the search results. Should I focus my time on Schema or building out a solid sitemap? Your feedback is appreciated! Tommy Swanson
Image & Video Optimization | | TommySwanson520 -
Does anyone know basics for tagging video content?
Can anyone recommend a good tutorial for tagging video content? We need to optimize the video HTML code to improve search results. thanks.
Image & Video Optimization | | BPIAnalytics0