YouTube has become one of the Internet's golden children, with so many videos being posted that if you tried to watch them all in their entirety, it would take over 400 years, and there are 200,000 videos being uploaded a day! The likelihood that someone will stumble upon your video is like finding a needle in a haystack, but the haystack is one of hundreds of thousands of haystacks in the great plains of America. Therefor many people want to not only have the video on YouTube, but also have the video on their website. This article describes how to "embed" a YouTube video on your personal website or blog.

Why embed your video?

By embedding the YouTube video in your website, you will be able to drive traffic to it using the same channels you use to promote any of the other content you produce. Hopefully you have an established goal for every aspects of your marketing program, and you can optimize your web-page to meet internal SEO best practices, if not then connect with a company that can get your marketing program established correctly. YouTube does not allow you to modify your YouTube page very much and all the "call-to-actions" on a YouTube page promote YouTube and not your business. Embedding the YouTube video on your website will allow you to design your page with all the internal SEO designs so it can be found easily for specific keywords, and you can use Social Media to drive traffic to the page without having to host the video on your own server.

Setting up your YouTube account:

Your YouTube account should be set-up in your company name, as this will also be the name of your channel. At this time, YouTube does not allow changes to the User Name, so make sure you have picked one you like. You can delete a User Name and start over, but all content associated with that User Name will not transfer to the new name.

Posting your video on YouTube

When you post your video to YouTube there are several things to keep in mind in order to get the maximum SEO results and traffic to your site. The title is the most important aspect of on-site SEO, so make sure the title is well-thought out. Make sure your title is not more than 64 characters and it includes your primary keyword(s). Each video also allows a "description" section, and you often only get 200 characters to use in this section. Always make sure when you post a video to include your web-site's URL, including the http://, in the beginning of the video's description. This is the only place in the YouTube posting where you can have a hyperlink to a site outside of YouTube. Finally be sure to include your keywords in the Tags sectionIf you would like additional information on optimizing your video posting on YouTube, please let me know in the Comments section below.

Creating your video page on your website

As with any page being used in your Internet Marketing program, give the web-page an easy-to-remember URL so that it can easily be spread virally. Try to have your primary keyword included in the Title of the page, the URL and the H1 heading of the page. Once you have a page created that has good meta-tags, and an SEO-optimized foundation, you will want to embed your video. Go to your YouTube video page and select the code in the "embed" field. If you are looking at your channel page, you will have to switch over to the "View comments, related videos, and more" so that you are looking at the video profile page. The Video Profile page should look lu=ike the below image, and the embed code is circled in red.

Copy this code by right-clicking your mouse or using Ctrl-V on your PC keyboard. Open the editor for your web-page, and paste the code into the page. If you are using a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor, you may not be able to paste code directly into the page. Most editors have a way to access HTML directly, so if the code does not paste correctly, contact your webmaster to find out how to embed code into the page. If your website is not able to accept embedded code, you may want to look to upgrading your website. Video is becoming more of a standard item for websites, and soon visitors will expect it.

If you have any comments, feedback or suggestions please let me know in the comments section.