How To Add Video To Your Website Using YouTube For FREE!

If the saying that a picture is worth a thousand words is true, you can only imagine how many words a video might be worth for your company and website, which is why using video on your website is an excellent marketing tool for your visitors.

If you have a product to sell or an item you would like to demonstrate, there is nothing better than doing this via video. Instead of your visitor having to read through a thousand words, you can describe your product item within the space of a few minutes, and lets be honest, watching a video is far more entertaining than reading.

With the invention of YouTube, the ability to add videos to your own website has now become a very cost effective method, in fact so cost effective, its free. Before YouTube we had to worry about making sure you could upload videos by your own system, then have some kind of conversion software to convert the video to Flash and then if the video was a big hit, we would have to start worrying about the excessive bandwidth on the server caused by the data load.

So, a few years ago we welcomed YouTube. YouTube allows us to host any of our clients videos and then include them on their own website, with the ability to set the size and style of the video, which makes video available to any of our clients, even those who have very little knowledge of how to do this.

The steps below will help you to include video onto your website –

1. Sign up to YouTube. Go to http://www.youtube.com/create_account and simply enter all of your details. Once you have done this, you now have a fully accessible YouTube account. If you already have a Google account you can usually use this to access your YouTube account.

2. Once logged in, click onto My Videos on your user menu in the top right hand corner. On the next screen, click onto New and then Video Upload.

3. Pay close attention to the next screen where you will need to enter the Title, Description, Tags and categories. This is how people may find your video on the actual YouTube site, so make sure you do pay attention to what you enter here. When done, click onto Upload Video and follow the simple steps.

4. Once you have done this, locate your video and look on the right hand side of the page, and you will then see “embed”. Click onto the little wheel next to it to customise the look and size of the video. You will probably not get the exact colours for your website, but choose the closest. Remember to untick the “include related videos” as you do not want this on your site.

5. Once you are happy, copy the code which will look something like:

< *** object width=”560″ height=”340″><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/ endofthelink =en&fs=1&”></param><param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true”></param><param name=”allowscriptaccess” value=”always”></param><embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/endofthelink here type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowscriptaccess=”always” allowfullscreen=”true” width=”560″ height=”340″></embed><*** /object>

6. Paste this code into your website and either upload your page to your server or add it to your blog.

And there you have it. Your own videos, on your own site but hosted by YouTube. All they ask for is a logo on the video, but to most people that is a small price to pay when you think of how much money you are saving when it comes to hosting, uploading and converting videos.

Why SEO Is So Important For Your Site And Your Business

SEO or Search Engine Optimisation seems to be a word branded and thrown around the internet, for which everyone needs to have some SEO completed on their sites or business are looking for SEO specialists to get them the illusive traffic that will convert to sales. But, when we look at SEO, just how important is it for your site and your business and what exactly does it mean?

Search Engine Optimisation almost explains itself in the title. SEO in its basic form of explanation is all about getting more people or visitors to your site through search engines and other referrals. Getting your search engine ranking placements higher (or your SERPs as the trade would refer to them) is what SEO is really all about, ranking and then improving upon your ranking placement for your chosen keywords.

SEO is mainly about experiences, willingness to learn and try new methods and most of all the time and patience to complete the many different tasks associated with a success full SEO campaign. I have often said before the SEO is about many different boxes, the more you tick the better you will do.

The basics are simple enough:

Make sure your site is optimised for the engines, including making sure you have good title, description and keyword tags in place.

Make sure all of your navigation is strongly structured and correctly working.

Ensure that your site has plenty of unique and well written content, no matter what you are trying to achieve, as content is the king when it comes to the search engines.

Just by doing these three things you will already have the basics and starters of a good SEO campaign. But, this really is just the start and you will now need to move onto more proactive traffic getting measures, which consist of many different activities but are all based around SEO and SEM (Search Engine Marketing). Some of these measures may well include:

Content Writing
Link Building
Press Releases
Article Submission
Social Bookmarking
Blog Writing And Submission
Pay Per Click Campaigns

And these are just a few things you can do for the SEO of your own website or business site. We can soon begin to see just how much hard work, time and effort is involved in running a successful SEO campaign, which if done correctly can be the difference between the success and failure for your website.

CPC And PPC – Why You Should Pay For Traffic Alongside Natural SEO Traffic

Buying traffic has often been seen as an expensive and unnecessary way of generating traffic, with many people thinking that just having a good website will send you loads of traffic. Sadly, this is not the case; I really wish it were. Even the biggest and best websites, companies and brands pay for traffic, so why wouldn’t you?

Pay Per Click (PPC) or Cost Per Click (CPC) will often be dismissed by many new site owners, as they can think that a new website will immediately send them traffic. If you were to equate this to opening a new shop on the high street, you would just be hoping people come across you as they look for something else, if you do not pay for advertising. Hence, when a new shop opens the owner or owners will do a big marketing campaign, local papers and flyers etc.

If we then think about this for a site, you can not really just launch a site and expect people to find it. Good SEO should always be your main focus, and, in many years all of the good things you have done, like content, article writing, press releases and link building will not only pay off but see you riding high for your keywords.

But, it does take a long time to get there; there can be no question of this is you are doing things properly and ethically.

This is where PPC and CPC, or paying for clicks really can come in. For all of my clients, I recommend setting up a CPC campaign to last for at least a year. This means that whilst they and I are working on the SEO, building content and tailoring the site, they are getting traffic and hopefully making sales and finding out exactly how their market and indeed their website is working.

If you are bidding on top keywords, it can be very expensive, just like if you are going for top natural keywords in Google, it can be very hard to do. But with a little bit of thought and research, you can put together a range of CPC campaigns for a very low price. Some of my clients spend a pound a day on traffic and get quite a bit for that pound, and some spend 100 times this and also do as well.

It really depends on how much research you are willing to do. Look at your competitors, see what they are bidding on and then look at what you want to bid on. If you are selling LCD TVs, don’t bid on LCD TVs, start setting up small campaigns actually bidding on the exact model or make of the TV. You would be surprised how many people actually know what they are looking for and search exactly, meaning you can pick up this click for a lot less than bidding on something much more generic.

Never see CPC or PPC as you have failed to do things naturally. This will happen if you give it time. Simply see it as another form of advertising which if done correctly, is not only cost effective but very efficient.