Using playlists on YouTube is a great way to help get more views on your videos, improve your video rankings, organize content and more. But there’s one option that’s available with Playlists that you shouldn’t take.
And that’s embedding a playlist on your website or blog.
Why You Shouldn’t Embed A Playlist On Your Website Or Blog
For this post, I’m going to use a playlist called ‘Motown Style Grooves’ from my bass guitar website. Here’s what it looks like if I embed that playlist here on Da Spoon:
Now what happens if you click the PLAY button is that YouTube will play the entire playlist, which currently stands at 9 videos.
And for sure I could introduce the playlist, and tell you what it’s about and so on. But say you only wanted to watch one of the videos in that 9 video playlist, there’s no easy way of navigating to that one video.
Embedding A Playlist Makes It Hard For The Viewer To Consume The Content
Because YouTube delivers all the videos of a playlist one after the other, you are making it harder than it needs to be for the viewer to effectively consume the video content. A more effective solution is:
- Either: embed the videos that make up a playlist separately in a single post. Each video can then be introduced via an appropriate heading and some introductory text. That allows your viewers to navigate the different videos of your playlist more easily.
- Or: embed each video on a separate content page. Although that spaces the videos out on your website, each page can be optimized for different long tail SEO phrases – and each content page can also be cross linked from other relevant pages, and you can have a ‘introduction’ page that links each of the sub-pages.
Which option you take depends on the goals of your website or blog – but either option is a better way to display the video content from a playlist than using YouTube’s ‘Embed’ code for the playlist.
This Applies To Twitter, Facebook and GooglePlus Shares Too
On your playlist page, as well as Embed code, you’ve also got buttons to share on Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Tumblr, Blogger, GooglePlus, StumbledUpon and the like.
The same principle applies to these options too – send people to a page where the content is easily consumable rather than a page where the content is arranged in playlist order without any inter-playlist navigation.
Summary
Playlists are a great YouTube strategy to get higher rankings and views , and the topic of playlists is covered in detail in The Content Marketer’s Video Playbook. And though YouTube gives you an ‘Embed’ option for your playlists, this is an option you should choose not to exercise.
Instead embed the content of your playlist in a manner that makes it easier for your audience viewers to consume – either on separate content pages, or laid out like a ‘list’ post with introductions and explanatory text.
The Content Marketer’s Video Playbook
If you’re on my email list, you’ll hear more details on Monday. If you’re not on my email list, that’s a big hint. Or you’ll have to wait a couple of weeks longer.
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{ 1 comment }
I agree playlits can be long and hard to surf by but it’s still a great method on youtube to get higher rankings.
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