OVBlogger: Blogging and SEO

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Are you into using video yet? If not, and you’re well on your way with blogging, it’s time!

There are several reasons. First, you don’t have to make your own videos. Finding a video in your niche and adding it to your blog is a great way to add content and not have to think too much about it. Here’s how to embed video in your blog, if you grab it from YouTube, for example.

1. You go to the video page, and on the right hand side, as the video is playing, you’ll see a line of code in a box, and above it says, “Embed.” So, copy that code and put it into a plain text editor like Notepad (Don’t use Word. It does creepy stuff when you try to translate to HTML.)
2. Go to your WordPress blog dashboard.
3. Click on the Write tab
4. Give your entry a headline and write whatever introduction you want for the video into the blank.
5. Above the writing pane, you’ll see a tab that says “Code.” Click on it.
6. Under the introduction you just wrote, type in <center><embed>
7. Paste in the code you copied at YouTube.
8. Directly after it, type in </embed></center>
9. Go back to the writing pane and click “Save and continue editing.”
10. When the page refreshes, you won’t see the video in the writing pane, so DON’T FREAK OUT!
11. Click on Preview
12. You’ll see that the video is indeed working and you can give just a little shout of victory!

Adding video is very cool and easy to do, and there are plenty of sites to get it from–Google Video, Blip TV, Daily Motion, and so on. Just look for the embed code for the video and do what I mentioned above.

If you make your own videos, it’s not that different to get it into your blog, you just have to store the video on your own server, create your own code, and embed a player. It’s much easier to upload to a video directory site and let them do all the work, plus save space on your hosting account.

But if doing all that is beyond your realm of expertise, you can actually buy a product called “Video Web Wizard,” which I have used in the past, and it will do all the dirty work of embedding the video in a web page for you. It’s really inexpensive and works very well. It comes from Keith Gilbert, who’s like 18 years old. Wow! Wish I’d have started that young. But then, Tim Linden of StartXchange (the best traffic exchange on the planet) started when he was 15. All these Wunderkind. I think it’s awesome. Anyway…

If you use Camtasia, you can produce the video as a web page. The current Camtasia version is Camtasia 5, but you can get Camtasia 3 free at this blog:

http://www.downloadsquad.com/2007/11/22/techsmith-offers-free-camtasia-studio-download/

Lemme tell ya, Camtasia is the Bomb! If you’re going to buy it, however, it’s about $300 for the current version. I bit the bullet because video is where the Web is heading.

Then, when you’re done creating and editing your video, you can spend hours and hours uploading it to a gazillion different video sites. If you want a great way to do it and only upload the video once, you need to check out Traffic Geyser. It will upload the video for you to many different sites.

A new place, Tube Mogul, will allow you to upload to several sites free, but it has nowhere near the power of Traffic Geyser. Then, you can supplement by adding to sites that Tube Mogul doesn’t have by going to Jack Humphrey’s Friday Traffic Report and checking out his list of 50 video sites. Great post. Great blog. If you’re not a subscriber, well… You aren’t thinking straight.

But here’s the deal… People want to turn their computers into televisions, and with the speed of broadband and the fact that the majority of people have high speed connections now, it’s possible. And guess what? I bought Camtasia about 6 months ago and already made the money back and then some. So…

Get into video. Seriously. If you don’t, you’ll be left behind.

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