Embedding your own hosted videos from your own server into your own WordPress site is far more beneficial to your domains seo than hosting them somewhere like youtube. Once you create your own videos can can still upload them to youtube however you are far better off hosting them yourself.
The main reason you should host your own videos on your own server is because you can them submit them to the search engines using a video sitemap plugin (search engines LOVE sitemaps) which contains YOUR domains URL and NOT Youtubes or someone else’s.
Embedding Youtube videos on your site is like promoting Youtube and linking to them.
Embedding videos hosted on your own server and submitting those embedded links is promoting YOUR domains URL’s which is far better for YOUR Seo and building traffic to your site rather than building traffic to Youtubes site.
This Video tutorial for WordPress users will explain how to:
- Create your own Screencast videos
- Host your own videos on your own server
- Insert (embed) your videos on your WordPress site
Creating Your Own Screen Cast Videos
There’s several Free video tools which make creating your own video screencasts fast and easy without any real learning curve. I use Screenr.com however there are others which are online as well.
Premium Video screencast software like Camtasia is regarded as the best and will also take some time to master. They offer a 30 day free trial from their website.
How To Host Your Own Videos On Your Own Server
Once you’ve created your video, all you need to do is save it as a MP4 file format or download it from Screenr.com or Youtube in this format.
Next step is to create new folder (directory) on your server. This can be done inside your file manager located in your cpanel hosting admin or within FTP. e.g www.yourdomain.com/videos
Then its simply a matter of uploading the MP4 file to your server using file manager or FTP. File manager normally has a 50mg upload limit however FTP has a much larger limit.
If your video is absolutely huge you may need to use shell SSH access rather than FTP. Firefox offer a great free SSH addon as well as a nice FTP addon which i use.
How To Insert (Embed) Your Video In A Web Page
You can install a video player on your server manually to play the videos which you embed on your site.
Or
An easier option is to install one of these 3 video player plugins which all use JW Player for html5 and flash.
The plugin makes it easy to add your video you have uploaded to your server into your post/page and include a splash page as well as change the size of the player. No need for creating or editing code as you simply click the icon and insert the tag anywhere you want.
Update: I’ve now upgraded to using JW Player by installing the ProPlayer plugin.
This video will automatically be included in my video sitemap and indexed using my Domain’s URL by the search engines. If you see this video in Google’s results page and click on it, the link will click though to my site not Youtubes.
Brad Dalton
@wpsitesdotnet
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Great post Brad. I was looking for a way to host videos on my WP sites so I can benefit from all the backilinks rather then promoting YT. I have one question thou, do I need flash to watch Flowplayer videos?
Hi Tom
Flash components are included in Flowplayer so it depends on your system. You may be prompted to download Adobe flash if you don’t already have it installed. Generally, the Flash plugin needs to be installed in the web browser if you don’t already have it installed.
Great post. I have well over 100 videos posted to YouTube. While youTube makes it simple to put embed code on my site, I am just left with a bunch of links pointing back to YouTube. I don’t want my visitors running back to YouTube once the video is finished playing.
I’ve been looking for a simple solution to host my vidoes on my word press sites. This is the solution I have been looking for. simple and straightforward. I will be using this on all my future videos! I feel like an idiot because I’ve seen lots of videos using flowplayer.
You just unlocked the key to self-hosted video. Thanks!
Hi Albert
Thanks for the kind words
I have actually put my videos in a special video theme in a sub directory which you can check out here
Another option for embedding a large amount of videos on your own site would be to use Vimeo Pro which is a flat rate and they offer an excellent player which you can easily customize so stop reuse and download of your video’s.
Otherwise you would probably need to use a VPS hosting account for that amount of video’s and even upgrade to a higher level of VPS as the resource and storage usage on video’s is large
What do you think?