Adding a YouTube video to your site

You can easily embed a YouTube video in any blog post or page:

  • Get the URL for the YouTube video – watch the video on the YouTube site and you’ll see a URL panel to the top right of the video. Copy the URL (not the embed)
  • In your web page or post, paste the URL

Here is how a directly embedded YouTube link looks:

And this is the result.

Creating and uploading your own video

You can create your own video (or get someone to do it for you) and then upload your video to YouTube. Once on YouTube, it is an easy task to add it to your website.

A lot of people search for video content using YouTube, and your video may draw traffic in its own right. Your post or page will still be indexed by Google, and provides a second chance for your content to be indexed and rank.

YouTube is also optimized to play back video, and has features we can’t match in terms of speed and quality.

To create your own YouTube account, simply go to YouTube.com and click on the Sign Up link. Once you have an account, follow the Upload Video links to upload your video.

Other ways of embedding

This is the easiest way to add a YouTube video. But it only became available in early 2010, before that there were some plugins we used to support You Tube videos, and you may still have videos embedded using these plugins. They still work.

Embedding with the YouTube Brackets plugin

Here are the steps to embedding a YouTube video in a page or post on your site using the YouTube brackets approach – only use this if the direct method above isn’t working:

  1. go to Dashboard, Plugins and make sure the YouTube Brackets plugin is activated
  2. play the video on YouTube and copy the URL
  3. open up your post or page and type [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BvP99-Ci6k] (use the YouTube URL for your video – note you have to close the tag with a right square bracket ]
  4. here is how your embedded tag should look:
    [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BvP99-Ci6k]
  5. save your post / page and view it

When you view your page you should see an embedded video like this:

If you don’t see the video player, check in Dashboard, Plugins to make sure the YouTube plugin is enabled.