The content on your site needs to be both dynamic and engaging if you want your visitors to come back over and over again. Having video on your site isn’t just to complement your content, but it should actually help to improve your rankings in Google by making visitors to your site stay longer. After all, if they have a video to watch, they will be hanging around your site longer than a site without videos. If you are thinking about adding video to your website, here are a few pointers to consider.
Don’t completely depend upon video directories. It’s fine to host your video on free places like YouTube or Vimeo, however, there is the risk that you could lose your content if the account happens to be shut down. There are times when accounts are shut down without even a good reason and they often time won’t even allow you to appeal it. This can devastate your website. So the solution here is to try and host your own videos on your own server or a third party server that you pay for.
Consider using mobile compatible formats for your video. If you use a widely compatible format for your video, it is going to be very important to your website. Using something like MP4 is going to make your video compatible to most everything including all Apple devices. Whatever you do stay away from the Flash video format, as it is extremely limited to who can view it and can take an extended period of time to load.
Make the load times of your videos as short as possible on your end. Sure, you can’t control the speed of your users Internet connection, but you can help by compressing your video files to make them load faster. Even though quality might be important to you, if your quality is of at least “good” and not HD version people are still going to enjoy it and it is going to take a lot less time to download. Users of your site want stuff here and now, not 10 minutes from now.
It is important that your video is short and to the point. The shorter a video is the better chance it will be watched. If it is longer, then break it up into a series of videos. Basic rule is that if it’s an instructional video; don’t make it any longer than 5 minutes at a time. If it is a promotional type video, try to limit it to just two minutes.
Don’t clutter you page with all the videos jammed together in the same corner of your website. If the videos are ordered, you should position them in sequential order so the visitor will know which video they should click on first. Make sure to prioritize the videos into a logical order so that they visually flow. The text and images, if any, should work well with the video so that you have a dynamic and attractive layout.
