Some of the most popular posts in the blogosphere are those that include video. Just about everyone has a broadband Internet connection these days, so watching videos online — through Google Video, YouTube, Revver, and so on — is pretty accessible. As such, you’ll notice that many bloggers embed videos in their posts. These could be in form of video reviews or maybe it’s just to highlight a funny clip that they found on YouTube.

The trouble with embedded video is that these videos are typically not viewable within the confines of an RSS aggregator and most definitely not within the confines of an email subscription. Worst still, because the video is not displayed at all, it can be a little confusing for the reader when they see the post making mention of “the video above” when there doesn’t appear to be anything there!

This is why it’s important that every video post that you make, you include a brief note to remind RSS subscribers and email subscribers that they need to go to your site to watch the video. At the same time, this brief note probably shouldn’t appear on the website itself. How do you do this? Simple. Just make use of the noscript tag. Here’s an example:

<noscript> Javascript required. Please visit the BlueFur Blog directly to view the embedded video. </noscript>

Of course, you can customize that message as you see fit. You can even replace it with a hyperlinked image if you prefer. Anything contained within the noscript tags will only appear when Javascript is not enabled (like inside an RSS aggregator).