Thread: Does adding videos help?

Just wondering if adding youtube videos related to your blog will help boost traffic, SERP's, or whatever.

Nope. Videos have no direct effect on SEO. People like viewing videos, but they have to first find your site.

Videos will not do anything to boost your rankings unless you are picking up links to the pages with the videos. They do help retain traffic, because if someone finds a video they like, they will probably look around to see if you have other interesting videos.

Videos with a description are the fastest way to add content to your site...
But they are have no big effect in SERP or SEO..

Boost...

Traffic - if you put up an unusually video that spreads - viral
Serps - not necessarily unless above happens
Whatever - It could make your site more appealing, more information, better serving, etc... which then can boost links to increase serps - that could increase traffic.

Thanks everyone. Now next question:

I have seen a lot of folks getting videos from youtube, then putting a link watermark on them, then posting somewhere else. Is this illegal and if not, is it beneficial?

also, for a site I haven't quite started on yet: http://www.dsromcards.com

I plan on making my OWN videos, watermarking, and uploading. How well does this work for both traffic and whatever else?

Videos can be used as a method of online marketing and promoting a product/ service.. I think Youtube has an "embed" function so that the videos can be posted in other sites. Once you've uploaded your video with the watermark, you can always disable this function if you don't want it posted on other sites.

I had to do a little bit of research on video marketing for an article and came across this website:

Reel SEO

It's a website geared towards using videos as a marketing tool, optimizing them and SEO for videos. They have some good information there that will help you out with your questions. In fact on the first page is this article: Without Video, You Website will Not Rank in Google. The headline is crazy but the article does mention that Google may be looking at website with video a little better than those without.

Good luck

It has only helped me in bringing in traffic, but it is not a lot of traffic.

sometimes.. but of course those are the targeted readers.

You can post videos on Youtube, then put the link to your blog on the description, that way will brings some extra traffic to your blog.