Video on Home page

[VillasDiani]

Would it be good SEO practice to place a video on the home page? http://villasdiani.com Right in the middle of the home page is a text about Villas Diani, I would like to remove it and rather place there always one of our newest videos which will start play once somebody lands there.

As we are the only one of our competitor who has also videos of property rentals I would like to make out of it an advantage for our website which is not ranking:-(

I am very new to seo and I am very scared to do such move which might even worsen all:-(

I will appreciate any help

[TakeshiYoung]

I don't see why a video would hurt your rankings, as long as it doesn't slow down the load time of your page. Just make sure you have some text content in addition to the video and get high authority, relevant links to your site. Those are the most important factors for ranking.

[VillasDiani]

Thank you very much Takeshi. The video would not slow down the site, at least I hope, as it is hosted on our vimeo paid account. I hope that is not a problem.

Thank you very much and have good day!

[PhilNottingham]

Hi July,

Yes - I think it's completely fine to do as you suggest, though I'd recommend seeing if you can leave the text on the page somewhere as well - just so the page isn't too thin on the text front. However, you don't need to put any of those keywords in bold, as Google don't really consider these factors much any more.

One thing I would suggest you think about though is not having the video set to auto-play - as many users find this sort of thing irritating. You should also make sure to host your video away from YouTube in this instance, so use a secure third party platform to serve the video.

Thanks.

Phil

[MattJanaway]

July, take note here... Phil is the man to listen to regarding video!

I'm throwing my backing behind ensuring that the video doesn't auto-play.

I find generally that if the video does it's job then it helps to keep visitors on the page longer too

Matt

[jake372]

Hi Phil,

Great comment.  If you don't mind me asking, what are the reasons not to host the video on Youtube vs. a different platform?

[PhilNottingham]

Basically - because in this instance, the video will clearly be very sales and conversion focused, advertising the resorts and service. Such content will do really badly on YouTube, which means it may get devalued by Google and therefore rank badly.

Therefore, you'll have nothing to gain from YouTube here and if you put the video on YouTube you risk YouTube outranking your own domain - for your homepage on a fairly small site like that, this could be disastrous. YouTube is a great place for more informational content that isn't tied to a specific sales funnel, but is a dreadful place to put anything more commercial that you really need your site to rank for.

I've written about these principles in depth here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/hosting-and-embedding-for-video-seo, here http://www.seomoz.org/blog/building-a-video-seo-strategy and here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-marketing-value-of-youtube

[VillasDiani]

These are really good points, Although we have paid vimeo channel where we have videos of properties, which are also on our website, we have also few post with youtube video. I will remove them.

Thank you!

[VillasDiani]

I would like to ask if somebody know what is the best way to embed video on home page. I read that google does not read i frame.

Also it is a problem if i have featured video on home page with link to post where is again the same video?

Also it is not a problem if I plan to be changing the videos on the home page in period of the time 1-2months?

Also, people can embed video from there, is this not a problem?

Thank you for any advice

[jake372]

Phil,

Excellent.  Thank you for the response.