I’m always urging marketers to start using more video in their marketing efforts. Showing customer success stories and profiling your staff, products and offices, are great ways to help prospects and customers connect and build trust.

YouTube is a great resource for this because you can use this free tool to host, stream and create the player for your website, making about half of the hurdle to using video a no brainer.

When you upload your video to YouTube, the service converts just about any format to web friendly flash and then gives you code to put on your site so the video can be viewed by your visitors.

Recently, YouTube added some more options to this tool that allow you to set the player color and size and really customize the look and feel for your site.

They also slipped in a Google Search bar across the top of the video so your visitors have the ability to search YouTube right from your the video you are showing. There may be some instances in which this makes sense, but not for most people just wanting to use Google to host their promotional video. Fortunately, it’s not very hard to get rid of this function with some code.

In addition, the default YouTube setting allows viewers on your site to see what Google thinks are related videos to your video. Again, I can’t think of many cases where you would need or want this function enabled.

Once you grab the code YouTube provides you can add two little bits of code to eliminate the related videos function and the search function. If you use the “rel” attribute it will eliminate the search as well, but if you would like to keep the related function but get rid of search, use the show search attribute.

param name="rel" value="0"
param name="showsearch" value="0"

This image shows the added customization functions you can select before you grab your embed code.