For the purpose of this article we will refer often to YouTube because that is what most people are familiar with.

Everyone knows how powerful multimedia is on websites. It keeps viewers coming back time after time and it helps to make your site sticky. The website Entheos says that Creating a Sticky Web Site follows this pattern:

1. Fresh content
2. Interactive tools
3. Educational
4. Offers an electronic newsletter
5. Light on text content
6. Intuitive navigation
7. Branded with your identity
8. “Value-add” content for readers
9. Visually appealing

One of the greatest interactive tools is video. People love watching videos online. Whether they are from YouTube or another source doesn’t matter as long as they are there. But what about those of us who for whatever reason don’t have our own videos, or not enough to keep them fresh? The answer to that lies in using the work of others.

Finding appropriate videos

The first step in using videos is to find the ones that fit best with what your site is about. To do this make use of the search feature located at the top of every YouTube page.

For example if your website is about wedding dresses you would type wedding dresses into the search bar and get a variety of videos to choose from. Then it is a matter of going through and watching the videos that you look appealing to you and deciding if your visitors will like them.

Single or multiple videos

Depending on your needs you may want to include just one or two videos from a particular channel. The easiest way to do this is to copy and paste the embedding code that YouTube provides for you. Most other video portals also provide embedding code.

If you don’t see it on some videos it means the publisher of the video has chosen to restrict the ability to embed. If this is the case then you may have luck contacting them directly and asking for permission to use their videos. Most publishers don’t restrict the embed function so the simplest course of action is just to find one who doesn’t and use their videos instead.

What often happens is that you’ll find a particular publisher who you like. If that is the case you can either embed the videos one by one, or you can setup a feed that displays their entire channel. To do so embed the following code into your site:

http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/username/uploads

Be sure to replace “username” with the approriate username. This will create an RSS feed of all the videos in that publishers channel. This will ONLY create a text feed. If you want to embed the actual videos in the feed use the following:

http://www.youtube.com/rss/tag/username.rss

Again replace “username” with the appropriate channel name, but be sure to leave the .rss extension in place.

There are a couple of sites which do the work for you and allow you to display multiple videos from different sources. One of the most user friendly is Dynamic Vids which can embed videos from YouTube based on keywords. Another one is UBeek which will let you embed an RSS stream created from a playlist. You can also use Widgetbox YouTube TValso does something similar except it creates a media player instead of just a list.

The impact it will have on your site

There are many factors that come into play when looking at how well you benefit from using this method. My own personal experience was that:

• Bounce rate went from 93% to 65%
• The time spent viewing the site went from less than 1min average to between 3 and 5min average
• Comments increased 10 fold for almost all of the articles
• People began linking to the site much more frequently

The key is to present it properly. I go for the added value presentation as opposed to the driving force behind the site. It’s not my video and I don’t want my visitors to think it is. I want them to know that it is provided by others who were gracious enough to make them and allow others to use the content. I’ve not tried so I have no way of knowing this for sure, but I think it would cause a sharp decline in traffic if people thought you were trying to pass the videos off as your own.

Do you need permission?

Technically if the publisher has not restricted the ability to embed the videos they are giving their permission to use them. It never hurts however to send a quick email and let them know what you are doing and your website address. I’ve never had anyone tell me no, or block the videos. In fact I’ve had several people offer to make me videos especially for my site. Why? Because while I’m adding value to my site with their content it also helps them by bringing their content in front of more people.

How about you? Do you use embedded videos to enhance your site? Do you care if others use your videos to enhance theirs?