Video & SEO Guide
on Dec 20 in Blog, SEO by Phoenix_ws
Google is the main search engine that people use at present with a market share of 72% usage for the world. Most people in business try and spend a lot of money trying to become number one in the organic search of Google.
Google and many other search engines are evolving and going past the basic web page search to include images, video and other media. This is a great step forward as this will be a turning point in the way people can and will search. Google are already working and testing image recognition, meaning you will be able to search for information relating to a image taken with a smart phone.
Video’s have recently over the last three months been available to be used in Search Engine Optimisation and google will rank them depending on the information that is supplied with the video.
What Difference will a video make compared to normal SEO?
Normal search engine optimisation has been done since search engines first existed, but video SEO is very new and not well established yet. Also when a website is created Google sends a program around the open World of the Web called a spider to gather all new website addresses and new content, this does not apply to video’s at the moment. This means unless you submit the video’s yourself they will not be added to Googles video rankings.
What Benefits will Video SEO achieve?
Video SEO has many benefits over normal search engine optimisation
- -Video’s are displayed above normal organic search results
- -Less competition currently on the Web
- -Videos have to be self submitted to Google meaning less competition
- -Better message can be given in a video
How do you perform SEO on video’s ?
Video SEO requires a few things
- -A video in a web friendly file and video format – mp4, flv, avi / H.264, MPEG-4, or Theora
- -Basic knowledge of XML & FTP
- -A Google account to have access to Google Web master Centre
- -Web host which allow video hosting (normally this is just unlimited bandwidth and storage space)
- -Keywords for SEO
Adding video to your website ?
People that work to construct websites should know about the array of issues that are produced due to all the different web browses in the world. This is no different when it comes to adding video to your website, if you want to use video for SEO you must have the video hosted on your own website and not use services like Youtube as they will get all the SEO benefit. Hosting the video yourself is when the issues of compatibility will become a problem, flash videos are the most common file format of videos on the web. The issue’s with flash video are the fact that modern mobile browsers do not support them, Iphone, Ipad are the main ones that do not support viewing of Flash video. This will mean you will lose a growing market of users that could want to watch your video. There are methods around this, but they are to difficult to explain in this post.
Once the video has been added by which ever method you want to use, check the links below for more information you can begin the SEO for the video, you will need to make a Video Sitemap.
Video Sitemap
A video sitemap is a file that tells Google you have a video on your website and what the subject of the video is, this is due to Google not being able to know what the subject is without this information. Below is an example of a sitemap taken from google Webmaster Centre.
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
xmlns:video="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-video/1.1">
<url><loc>http://www.example.com/videos/some_video_landing_page.html</loc>
<video:video>
<video:thumbnail_loc>http://www.example.com/thumbs/123.jpg</video:thumbnail_loc>
<video:title>Grilling steaks for summer</video:title>
<video:description>Alkis shows you how to get perfectly done steaks every
time</video:description>
<video:content_loc>http://www.example.com/video123.flv</video:content_loc>
<video:player_loc allow_embed="yes" autoplay="ap=1">
http://www.example.com/videoplayer.swf?video=123</video:player_loc>
<video:duration>600</video:duration>
<video:expiration_date>2009-11-05T19:20:30+08:00</video:expiration_date>
<video:rating>4.2</video:rating>
<video:view_count>12345</video:view_count>
<video:publication_date>2007-11-05T19:20:30+08:00</video:publication_date>
<video:tag>steak</video:tag>
<video:tag>meat</video:tag>
<video:tag>summer</video:tag>
<video:category>Grilling</video:category>
<video:family_friendly>yes</video:family_friendly>
<video:restriction relationship="allow">IE GB US CA</video:restriction>
<video:gallery_loc title="Cooking Videos">http://cooking.example.com</video:gallery_loc>
<video:price currency="EUR">1.99</video:price>
<video:requires_subscription>yes</video:requires_subscription>
<video:uploader info="http://www.example.com/users/grillymcgrillerson">GrillyMcGrillerson
</video:uploader>
</video:video>
</url>
</urlset>
The example above looks a bit over whelming but here is the break down of each section so you can have a better understanding.
| Tag | Required? | Description |
<loc> |
Required | The tag specifies the landing page (aka play page, referrer page) for the video. When a user clicks on a video result on a search results page, they will be sent to this landing page. Must be a unique URL. |
<video:video> |
Required | |
<video:thumbnail_loc> |
Required | A URL pointing to the URL for the video thumbnail image file. We can accept most image sizes/types but recommend your thumbs are at least 160×120 pixels in .jpg, .png, or. gif formats. |
<video:title> |
Required | The title of the video. Limited to 100 characters. |
<video:description> |
Required | The description of the video. Descriptions longer than 2048 characters will be truncated. |
<video:content_loc> |
Depends | At least one of <video:player_loc> or <video:content_loc> is required. The URL should point to a .mpg, .mpeg, .mp4, .m4v, .mov, .wmv, .asf, .avi, .ra, .ram, .rm, .flv, or other video file format, and can be omitted if <video:player_loc> is specified. However, because Google needs to be able to check that the Flash object is actually a player for video (as opposed to some other use of Flash, e.g. games and animations), it’s helpful to provide both.Best practice: Help ensure that only Googlebot accesses your content by using a reverse DNS lookup. |
<video:player_loc> |
Depends | At least one of <video:player_loc> or <video:content_loc> is required. A URL pointing to a Flash player for a specific video. In general, this is the information in the src element of an <embed> tag and should not be the same as the content of the <loc> tag. Since each video is uniquely identified by its content URL (the location of the actual video file) or, if a content URL is not present, a player URL (a URL pointing to a player for the video), you must include either the <video:player_loc> or <video:content_loc> tags. If these tags are omitted and we can’t find this information, we’ll be unable to index your video.The optional attribute allow_embed specifies whether Google can embed the video in search results. Allowed values are Yes or No.The optional attribute autoplay has a user-defined string (in the example above, ap=1) that Google may append (if appropriate) to the flashvars parameter to enable autoplay of the video. For example: <embed src="http://www.example.com/videoplayer.swf?video=123" autoplay="ap=1"/>.
Examples: Youtube: Dailymotion: Best practice:Help ensure that only Googlebot accesses your content by using a reverse DNS lookup. |
<video:duration> |
Strongly recommended | The duration of the video in seconds. Value must be between 0 and 28800 (8 hours). Non-digit characters are disallowed. |
<video:expiration_date> |
Recommended when applicable | The date after which the video will no longer be available, in W3C format. Acceptable values are complete date (YYYY-MM-DD) and complete date plus hours, minutes and seconds, and timezone (YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss+TZD). For example, 2007-07-16T19:20:30+08:00. Don’t supply this information if your video does not expire. |
<video:rating> |
Optional | The rating of the video. The value must be float number in the range 0.0-5.0. |
<video:content_segment_loc> |
Optional | Note: Use <video:content_segment_loc> only in conjunction with <video:player_loc>. If you publish your video as a series of raw videos (for example, if you submit a full movie as a continuous series of shorter clips), you can use the <video:content_segment_loc> to supply us with a series of URLs, in the order in which they should be concatenated to recreate the video in its entirety. Each URL should point to a .mpg, .mpeg, .mp4, .m4v, .mov, .wmv, .asf, .avi, .ra, .ram, .rm, .flv, or other video file format. It should not point to any Flash content. The value of the optional attribute durationspecifies the length of each clip in seconds.For example:
<video:content_segment_loc duration="600">http://example.com/url1</video:content_segment_loc> <video:content_segment_loc duration="500">http://example.com/url2</video:content_segment_loc> <video:content_segment_loc duration="700">http://example.com/url3</video:content_segment_loc> <video:content_segment_loc duration="600">http://example.com/url4</video:content_segment_loc> |
<video:view_count> |
Optional | The number of times the video has been viewed. |
<video:publication_date> |
Optional | The date the video was first published, in W3C format. Acceptable values are complete date (YYYY-MM-DD) and complete date plus hours, minutes and seconds, and timezone (YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss+TZD). For example, 2007-07-16T19:20:30+08:00. |
<video:tag> |
Optional | A tag associated with the video. Tags are generally very short descriptions of key concepts associated with a video or piece of content. A single video could have several tags, although it might belong to only one category. For example, a video about grilling food may belong in the Grilling category, but could be tagged “steak”, “meat”, “summer”, and “outdoor”. Create a new <video:tag> element for each tag associated with a video. A maximum of 32 tags is permitted. |
<video:category> |
Optional | The video’s category. For example, cooking. The value should be a string no longer than 256 characters. In general, categories are broad groupings of content by subject. Usually a video will belong to a single category. For example, a site about cooking could have categories for Broiling, Baking, and Grilling. |
<video:family_friendly> |
Optional | No if the video should be available only to users with SafeSearch turned off. |
<video:restriction> |
Optional | A list of countries where the video may or may not be played, in space-delimited ISO 3166 format. The required attribute "relationship" specifies whether the video is restricted or permitted for the specified countries. Allowed values are allow or deny. Only one <video:restriction> tag can appear for each video. If there is no <video:restriction> tag, it is assumed that the video can be played in all territories. |
<video:gallery_loc> |
Optional | A link to the gallery (collection of videos) in which this video appears. Only one <video:gallery_loc> tag can be listed for each video. The value of the optional attribute title indicates the title of the gallery. |
<video:price> |
Optional | The price to download or view the video. The required attribute currency specifies the currency in ISO 4217 format. More than one <video:price> element can be listed (for example, in order to specify various currencies). |
<video:requires_subscription> |
Optional | Indicates whether a subscription (either paid or free) is required to view the video. Allowed values are yes or no. |
<video:uploader> |
Optional | A name or handle of the video’s uploader. Only one <video:uploader> is allowed per video. The optional attribute info specifies the URL of a webpage with additional information about this uploader. This URL must be on the same domain as the <loc> tag. |
once the file has been created whether this is done by your self or a web developer it will need to be submitted to Google. The important part of the video sitemap is the keywords and content descriptions these need to include the SEO keywords that you use and have researched into for your current website.
Submit the sitemap to google link
Related articles
- 7 Deadly Sins of Video SEO (getelastic.com)
- The Search Engine Optimisation Dictionary – Your Guide To SEO Jargon (ronmedlin.com)
- SEO success for your blog in 10 easy steps (businessesgrow.com)
