Hi Michelle,

So, my answer here is essentially - "Test some stuff out and see what works." There is no algorithmic preference for the exact placement of video on a page and so the decision should be based on user experience, the kind of videos that you are embedding and the focus of the pages in question.

If you have lots of nice unique product-promoting videos, then my temptation would be to suggest putting them prominently on the page, ideally above the fold, but certainly somewhere eye-catching that drives potential customers to click through and watch.

However, if your videos are essentially going up to support existing articles and enhance the overall quality of the page from Googlebot's perspective, but don't add a great deal to the user experience - then you want to make sure the videos are not too prominently placed.

While putting videos below the fold is one option in this instance, something else you can do to reduce the space they take up is reduce the player frame-size, so they fit in a sidebar, or somewhere away from the main body of content.

Ultimately you need to play to your strengths and the typical audience use cases you deal with. If your videos are really good and convert well - emphasize them, if your videos are somewhat low quality and are just there to offer SEO benefit, then don't emphasize them so much.

Phil

That's not actually true Martin.

YouTube very very rarely drives much traffic back to your site. If you want traffic to your site, you're much better off securely hosting the content and driving traffic from Google with rich snippets - rather than forcing users to go to YouTube and then from there navigate to your site.

I disagree with your assessment and advice here.

Through vimeo pro (which isn't the same as vimeo - confusing, i know) you can get your own site to rank rather than YouTube.com or Vimeo.com, which would likely be the preferable option here. Linking them together then becomes a bad idea - since it makes little sense for users.

Additionally, Google won't rank whichever it thinks is the original, as it has no mechanism to work out whether videos hosted on different platforms are the same thing. In such situations, Google actually rank whichever page is stronger and more relevant - which, for any site with a fairly weak domain - is normally the YouTube.com version.

Your schema implementation seems fine, but I'd also recommend creating a video sitemap if you struggle with indexation, since this is typically a more surefire way of getting the videos indexed. The YouTube embed may also be confusing for Google with regards to "which video do i index", so a video sitemap would help with this as well.

However.... my main comment regarding the question of further value and improving rankings would be that you seriously need to look at your page types and the quality of the content you're creating.

I want to say this in the nicest possible way... but that video, and the page structure as a whole, is pretty bad. The video is incredibly slow moving and actually doesn't provide any valuable information, which could actively harm your conversion rate and bounce rate rather than help matters. I'd suggest you next spend time looking to improve your site design and structure - which should help improve your conversion rate. Following this, It'll be much easier for you to do things like link building which will help increase rankings.

I actually don't think you should make the judgement regarding what needs changing yourselves - or take my word for it either! That said, I agree that the points you mentioned are particularly problematic

Your initial starting point should be to source some data from actual users and user testing groups regarding their perceptions of the site - particularly looking at what may have prevent conversions or almost stopped people from converting. There's tons of information about this stuff (CRO) online - but I'd start with running the Panda questionnaire that i mentioned previously and then use http://www.usertesting.com/ to source some good feedback from a wider selection of individuals.

From here - you should then hire a designer or get a freelancer in, who can action this stuff and come up with a refreshed design.

Nope, they can't. Those links are within the iframe.

If you're trying to get link equity from embedded video, it'll need to be with crediting text links or images outside of the actual player, as overlays are done with JavaScript, which doesn't pass PageRank by all accounts.

Google see iframes as basically "a window into other sites". As such, no, they don't crawl links in this way - however, they will likely then crawl the page which the iframe references, and thereby pick up any backlinks there.

I'm not quite sure how this might related to an embedded YouTube video, but YouTube videos are indexed instantly anyway once they're published because Google don't need to crawl YouTube (they have access to the database)

Hey Dan,

In short - no, I don't think is going to be a problem for you. YouTube are aware that their auto-generated transcripts are often inaccurate, so I don't imagine you're going to find that profanity coming up there has any effect on the categorization of the video. That said, It's really easy to fix by just uploading your own version of the transcript, which will take precedence over the autogenerated one. ThompsonPaul has given a great explanation of a quick and easy way to do that also on this thread.

In terms of a channel trailer, once you log into your YouTube account, under the "Home" button, there should be a massive icon called "Channel Trailer" with a blue button, which will allow you to upload a trailer or choose one from your library.