Online videos have rocketed in popularity over the past five years, mainly due to the impact of YouTube and the fact that it is now so easy to shoot a video for your business or product. Some of the latest webcams are so good that you simply do not need to buy really expensive equipment, you can simply plug in and off you go, but using a flip cam or small camcorder does produce the best results for businesses when using videos on their site.
Many webmasters, business owners and website managers wonder why they should be using videos on their website, worrying that replacing text with videos would be detrimental to SEO and would also increase the strain on their servers. Both of these worries are totally unfounded and in fact, websites that are selling products or services simply must have videos as it will lead to increased sales and enquiries, as long as the videos are of good quality.
The Internet has changed the way we find information. Over the past few years people would rather watch someone telling them how to do something than read a three hundred word article about it. For example, if you wrote an article about SEO and then also recorded yourself reading the article, the chances are that the video would be more popular, even though it's the same information on offer. Internet users just seem to prefer videos to text in the modern day, as they believe it is more concise, personal and sometimes more informative.
Adding videos onto your website will increase the length of the visitor per user, simply because you have more chance of people watching your videos than reading all of your text. It is easier to watch a video on a site than sit and read through three or four pages of text when they can get the same information from a short and concise clip.
The reason YouTube, DailyMotion and other video sharing websites are so popular is really simple - they offer quick videos for all niches, meaning that half an hour spent on YouTube can often be the equivalent to sitting down for 3 hours finding and reading through tons of articles and content on websites.
Along the same lines as online games, videos offer interactivity for your website, with Web 2.0 really being about interactivity and trying to engage with the user on a much more personal basis. By having a couple of videos on your site advertising you and your services or products allows the user to see everything they need to know about what they might be buying or see the person behind the service on offer.
As the long as the videos are nicely shot, of decent quality and are informative, you can rest assured that having these videos on your site will lead to increased visitor lengths, as when users feel engaged and interested, they will stick around to find other videos and more information about you and your products or services that your website is promoting.
