In my opinion, video is the FUTURE and everyone should get on board as soon as possible. I say this as a guy who has largely resisted video. Most of my enjoyment comes from writing and not creating, editing, and uploading videos. With that said, video is huge now and will get even bigger in the future.

If you want to have your own proprietary videos that are only on YOUR site and not shared on other sites like YouTube, you'll need to have a video host. The only video host I recommend is Wistia. Now, if you check out the pricing on Wistia (or other video hosts), you'll see that the price can really skyrocket as you create more and more videos. Wistia is awesome, no doubt about it. They give you special video SEO tools and even create a video sitemap that you can submit to Google so that your videos come up in Google search results. The platform they use is great, the videos stream very well, and I wouldn't use anyone else. But, again, it's pricey. So, what about a free alternative?

While it's nice to have exclusive videos just on your own site, remember that YouTube is the #2 search engine in the world! Not only that, but Google owns YouTube and displays YouTube videos prominently in Google search results. It is also still surprisingly easy to rank YouTube videos highly in a relatively short period of time. By using YouTube, you can have even more exposure while still embedding the videos on your own site.

As with anything else, it does take time and effort for video efforts to pay off, but having a consistent and truly helpful YouTube vlog can drive loads of traffic to your site and also provides another platform for you to obtain loyal followers that you can not only help, but also monetize. A great way to send traffic to your site is to give people incentives within' the video to check out your site. Also, ASK people to subscribe! Just say something like, "hey, if you liked this video please subscribe as it gives me more motivation to keep making videos in the future." You'd be very surprised at how well this works.

One final point here... Remember that everyone has their own preferred method to obtain information. Some people like written content that they can just scan and pick out the parts they want to read about. Others like watching video. Some people like slideshows and others prefer audio. The goal here is to provide as many forms of content on a page as you can (within reason of course).

On most of the pages I create on my sites, I will have a 1,000+ word article, but then I will go out and find at least 1 or 2 YouTube videos to embed, even if those videos weren't created by me. Sometimes I'll hop onto SlideShare and create a quick slideshow to embed on my site. I might go to SoundCloud and record myself reading the article and embed that on the page.

Ok fine, just ONE more thing. ;) If you do decide to get involved with YouTube, make sure you look up proper YouTube SEO. There is a ton of advice out there, but here are the key points...

- Perform keyword research just like you would for a page on your site
- Make sure the file name of the video is the keyword you wish to rank for
- Make sure the title of the video includes the keyword you wish to rank for
- Make sure the video description has at least a few hundred words and includes the keyword you wish to rank for as much as possible (while still sounding natural)
- Put the keyword you wish to rank for in the keywords tag along with a few variations of that keyword
- If you're really hardcore, create closed captions for the video. I've found this takes too long for what I get in return, but I do believe it helps.
- Fill in as much possible information as you can about the video in the settings (language, location, category, etc).

I might have gone a bit overboard here, but I hope this helps and please let me know if you have any follow-up questions!

Mike

You don't want to host videos on your wordpress site -- Doing that *would* slow your site significantly.

By hosting your videos at youtube (or some other video hosting site), you can embed a link to the video on your site and not take any performance hit.

Jay (magistudios) has some training on this topic: SEO Advantages to Video Hosting (not on YouTube)

Chris videos do not slow your load time down much as they don't load on the front end. I think videos are always a great add to complement your text.

Hi there, Im following this question, i would also like to know. Every little bit of info helps. Im still feeling a little lost, but im getting there slowly but surely.