There are many ways to incorporate video into your IDA dental website. You can upload videos you’ve made yourself, or you can embed videos from YouTube, Vimeo, or other video sharing websites. You can also use stock videos from IDA’s Video Library.
To get the most from their internet dental marketing, many doctors record their own videos. A short welcome video from you can really add value to your website by letting prospective patients get to know the doctor and the practice.
You can record more videos of yourself to use on the website. Tell patients more about yourself, your dental practice, and the services you offer. In addition to a short welcome video for your home page, we also recommend recording a slightly longer video that focuses on the website’s target dental market.
It’s also a good idea for each dentist at the practice record a short personal video for their “Meet the Doctor” profile.
You can also embed videos from YouTube, Vimeo, or other video sharing sites right in your IDA website.
If you have your own videos you’d like to add to your dental website, begin by clicking “My Videos” underneath “Photos, Videos & Files” on the lefthand menu. If you’ve already uploaded any videos, you’ll see them here.
The “Add Video” button lets you add your own videos.
If you have the video on your computer as an MP4 file (the most common type of video file), select “Upload MP4.” Then select your video from your computer. The Control Panel will upload the video and show you its details. When you click “Next,” you’ll be asked to choose a thumbnail image for this video. This is the picture that your video will display when it’s not playing. You might select the video’s first frame, or you might choose a good-looking frame later in the video, or you can even upload your own thumbnail image for maximum control.
Then it’s time to add some additional information to your video. Visitors to your website will be able to see the video’s title and read its description. So will the search engines! You can further improve your search engine results positioning by including tags separated with commas. These should be keywords that describe your video. In addition, IDA’s system will automatically tag your video with information about you and your practice.
Then click “Save” to finish uploading the video. Close the dialog box, and you’ll see the video has been added to “My Videos.”
You can also add videos that are already posted on video sharing sites elsewhere on the internet. YouTube is, of course, the most popular.
To import a video already hosted on YouTube, you’ll need to know the Video ID. When you go to YouTube and view the video, you can see the ID in the web address. You can also find it by clicking the “Share” button. Just copy the ID – that’s the part after http://youtu.be/ – and then paste this into the Control Panel. When you click “Import,” your video will show up below.
Next, you can review the video’s title, description and tags. The information from YouTube has automatically been entered here, but you can change it. However, you cannot change the thumbnail for this video, since it has already been selected in YouTube. Then click “Save” to finish.
IDA also lets you add videos that are on Vimeo, another popular video sharing website. This process is the same as for YouTube: paste in the video ID to import the video, edit the title, description, and tags, then save and finish.
You can add videos hosted on sites other than YouTube or Vimeo by selecting “Paste HTML.” Here, you’ll paste the snippet of code provided by that video sharing website.
Click “Download Video Specifications” to view a PDF that explains more technical details about how to produce, render and export your videos. We have instructions for Camtasia Studio, Adobe Premiere, and Sony Vegas, that include information like the recommended frame rate, bit rate and aspect ratio.
If you’re not satisfied with how your videos look or play on your website, check out the Video Troubleshooting guide to fine-tune your dental website video marketing.
