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Make Your Videos Search Friendly
Google is making it easier for webmasters to tag their video content to get indexed in the Google search results. Because video content is graphic based and not text based it’s hard for Google’s spiders to index this type of content.
“While we’ve become smarter at discovering this information on our own, we’d certainly appreciate some hints directly from webmasters,” says Google’s Michael Cohen, Product Manager for the Video Search Team.
To help make videos more search-engine friendly, Google now supports the following mark-up formats for videos:
It’s too soon to say if one mark-up is better than the rest. Personally, I recommend the Facebook Share method of mark-up because it’s simple; all you do is add a few lines of meta tag information in your header tag. Just like you enter title tags, alt tags, and keywords for your website pages – you also need to optimize your videos to be search friendly.
The Facebook Share mark-up includes the following information for the search engine spiders:
- Link to the Video Thumbnail
- Link to the Video File
- Video Title
- Video Description
- Video Dimensions (Height & Width)
Example of the Facebook Share mark-up: Copy and paste into your header tag, customize the bold sections to your video content. If you’re embedding video from Youtube the video source would be something like “http://www.youtube.com/v/jPtBdydGnWY&hl=en&fs=1″
<head>
<link rel=”image_src” href=”http://example.com/thumbnail_preview.jpg” />
<link rel=”video_src” href=”http://example.com/video_object.swf“/>
<meta content=”My Video Description “/>
<meta content=”My Video Title” />
<meta content=”296” />
<meta content=”512” />
<meta content=”application/x-shockwave-flash” />
</head>
This site has some examples and additional information about the Facebook Share mark-up format and a place to treat your page to make sure you did it right.
http://developer.search.yahoo.com/help/objects/video
Both Google and Yahoo are accepting the Facebook Share mark-up language for videos. While it’s not guaranteed that adding this code to your site will get your videos indexed, at least your videos are now search engine friendly. I would make sure to use your targeted keyword phrases in your video title and description. Just don’t abuse the system. Make sure the content in your videos matches the title and description you tag it with.
The highlights in yellow show how optimized videos show up in the search results. What you use in your Facebook Share mark-up is what Google displays in the search results.
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