Video and SEO

[bronxpad]

I am planning on placing some short how to videos on my site. My question is what is the best way to implement video.

• Youtube
• Vimeo
• Self Hosted Video

How do I ensure that the video can be viewed by all devices if it is self hosted?

[danatanseo]

Hi Joel,

Unless you have some fairly robust IT resources I would advise against self-hosting. If you want eyeballs, I'd go for YouTube. If you want traffic and you want your videos to rank in Google and then direct visitors back to your site (instead of directing them to YouTube), I'd opt for Vimeo or Wistia (which is what SEOMoz uses). Even if you can do everything to get your videos formatted right for different devices, 6 months from now you might have to do that all over again. If you go with 3rd party the formatting is done for you and will always be current with things people are using at any given moment.

Good luck!

Dana

[bronxpad]

So Wistia or Vimeo is better for SEO?

[danatanseo]

Yes, definitely. Here are a couple of blog posts that give great explanations as to why this is the case: http://www.distilled.net/blog/video/getting-video-results-in-google/  and http://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/getting-links-and-seo-value-from-your-youtube-videos/  and  http://www.danatanseo.com/2012/09/creating-video-seo-strategy-is-hard-but.html

Enjoy!