By Katherine Andes
Several months ago, I embedded a You Tube video on a client’s website. It worked out well. A visitor could click on the video image and it would play without the visitor leaving the site.
But one day, I revisited the site and there was a different video than what I had loaded — the owner had wanted to mix things up a bit.
I clicked on the video’s image and the link took me to the You Tube website to view the video … and off my client’s site.
Using You Tube videos can be great for your business and helpful for your visitors. But it’s a web best practice to embed the video within your web page. Why?
If you send your visitor off your site, he is very likely to get distracted by the other offerings on the You Tube site. He may surf other videos or decide to read the comments. Your visitor might never come back to your site.
The good news is that it’s easy to embed a You Tube video in most website systems. Just follow these steps:
• Go to page with the desired You Tube video
• Click on <embed> (located under video on right)
• Uncheck related videos
• Keep border checkmark
• Choose border color that matches your website
• Choose a pixel width (guess if you must, you can always go back and change it)
• Then copy the code (edit menu+copy)
• Using your website editor, find the place on your page where you want to insert the video
• Type this in: INSERT VIDEO HERE (a place mark)
• Click on the icon that has <> or says HTML
• This will change your page to HTML code
• Find the INSERT VIDEO HERE text
• Paste your code in after the place-marking text (edit menu+paste)
• Delete INSERT VIDEO HERE
• Update or submit
If you’ve never loaded your own code before, you’ll feel really proud of yourself. Be sure to write and send me the link so I can congratulate you, too.
Easy Furniture Web Tip #88: To keep visitors on your site, it’s a web best practice to embed video rather than link to video off-site. It’s also easy.
Katherine Andes is a consultant who specializes in writing custom content for key web pages, including search engine optimization (SEO) — especially in the home improvement market. You can phone her at 559.589.0379 or email at Kathy@AndesAndAssociates.com.