Rotating Videos In Sidebars
I’ve always liked having a video in the sidebar of my blogs, especially in the WP-Vybe theme that, for now, is my preferred Premium theme.
The problem is that, especially if you have your Right Hand Sidebar enabled in Posts, everyone keeps seeing the same damn video on every page load – boring!
You know what really helps in ranking well in Google! Well one aspect anyway? The time your visitors spend on your site!
Google knows how long visitors stay on your pages, looking around. The longer they stay is perceived, obviously, by Google as a good thing. You only have to have installed the Google Analytics plugin on your site to check what Google thinks about you, one of their biggest issues is ‘Bounce Rate’ – if someone leaves your site within 2 seconds Google rightly suspects that maybe your page or post has not given the answer they were after when they typed in their Search Phrase!
Guess what will happen to your rankings over time for that page or post if Google ses that happening a lot?
The way I read their results ‘time on site’ is a MASSIVE part of their algorithm
SO! Visitors staying on your page is to be encouraged therefore which is why I like embedding relevant videos into posts. I asked a question on a forum recently re finding some javascript code to do this and was instead sent along to this plugin page.
This plugin is for your sidebar though ( it’s a widget) so you can add, say, 10 different YouTube videos to show up randomly as your visitor moves form page to post to page on your site (admiring all your lovely content!) Nice if they choose to watch one or two.
It’s neat, as you just need to add the YouTube (or other video site) reference # and not lots of code. Problem is that I get the standard ‘grey’ YouTube interface and I like colorizing to fit my sites themes – ahh well…
I’ve tested it out with 3 random cocktail videos from VideoJug.com and it seems to work but am unable to get any text above or blow the video or give the vidoes a header title. But I haven’t played with it much yet and have only used VideoJug.com so far ( easiest to work out height and width ratio i.e. 300×252)
But always remember to add stuff to your posts to get people to hang around longer. Polls are good: checkout Poll Daddy which is still free. Anything like that is good but Video and Audio (if relevant) work best in my humble opinion.
Current video sites supported by the plugin:
* Youtube
* Dailymotion
* Google Video
* Flv
* Vimeo
* Flickr
* Metacafe
* LiveLeak
* Revver
* iFilm
* MySpace
* Blip.tv
* CollegeHumor
* VideoJug
* GodTube
* Veoh
* Break
* Movieweb
* Jaycut
* Myvideo
* Clipfish
* Viddler
* Gametrailers
* Snotr
* Taratata
* Espn
* Mtv Music
* Quicktime
* Windows media player
* SchoolTube
