YouTube Direct – Upload Videos to Your Site!

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

YouTube now has a way for webmasters to allow site visitors to upload YouTube videos directly to their websites. But the program is designed for news sites like CNN.com and Huffington Post. That doesn’t mean that bloggers can’t participate, however. I think the program will likely be available to most websites in some sense.

But what is YouTube Direct? YouTube Direct is a platform that gives webmasters the ability to get user generated video content without developing their own application.

Here is a video that clearly explains YouTube Direct:

There are some advantages to being able to do this. First, you can keep your site visitors on your site a little longer. But, even better than that, you can have videos uploaded directly to your website instead of you going to YouTube and embedding videos, which can be a time consuming process. The big question is, will YouTube Direct provide webmasters and marketers with any search engine optimization benefits.

I think so, possibly. If videos are uploaded to your website then it’s possible that the search engines will index those versions of the videos. The videos will still exist on YouTube’s servers, but if you use Google Customized Search then visitors will be able to search your website to find video content. And, more importantly, searchers using the search engines to search for video content related to your niche may find it in the SERPs. That’s a huge ‘may’.

The other possibility is that searchers looking for video content will find those videos on YouTube and will have to click over to your site from there. It remains to be seen just how many SEO benefits webmasters will receive from YouTube Direct. Even without SEO benefits, however, it looks like a good deal. I’m just hoping for the best.