Embedding a YouTube Video in a Wordpress Blog
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There comes a time, after posting in plain text, that you want to add audio and/or video to your blog. Video will be a welcome touch for your visitors, and it will keep them on your site longer. Both good things! Adding video is not a hard task, but it can be tricky, so here are a few tips to get it right.
First off, we need a video. To get one, just go to YouTube.com and search for whatever topic your website is about. You'll probably have a few to choose from, so just click on the best one. Once you are there, you'll see a couple boxes to the right of the video that say "URL" and "Embed." Each box will have some HTML code in it. You don't need to understand the code, just how to copy and paste it.
The straightforward way would be to just paste the entire "embed" code for the video into your Wordpress dashboard. Depending on your version of Wordpress, that might work fine. But even if it does, there's more room for error with this method.
A better way would be to check out the Anarchy Media Player plug-in. It lets you embed a YouTube video or any other media file into your blog entries. It's pretty simple and only requires a link to the media file - no messy HTML. Check out their site for more info.
If you don't need anything that sophisticated, I've saved the simple solution for the end. Wordpress actually has a special set of tags for embedding Youtube videos. You just use the Youtube tag and the URL to the video. It's like this: [youtube=http://VideoURL].
For example:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRexp7gSz8E]
There you have it. Even if you don't create your own videos, it's easy to add video to your blog! No more excuses - get started!