Google’s 5 Video SEO Best Practices

Google recommends 5 greatest practices for website house owners to comply with when optimizing video content material for search outcomes.

This info is shared within the newest Lightning Talks video on the Google Search Central channel.

Google’s presentation on video SEO goes over how website house owners can ship indicators to speak what a video is about.

When Google can perceive what a video is about it’ll know how you can floor the video in Search and Discover.

Here’s a recap of Google’s recommendation.

Video SEO Signals Google Looks For

When Google crawls a web page and identifies that it comprises a video, it begins to search for indicators to know what the video is about. Those indicators are what enable the video to get surfaced for related searches.

Google makes use of these indicators to know a video:

• On-page textual content: Such as web page title, headings, and captions close to the video.
• Referral links: Signals despatched from different websites linking to the video.
• Structured data: Markup that communicates video metadata to Google.
• Video recordsdata: Google can the file itself to know the audio and visible content material.

Video SEO is about including the proper parts to a web page in order that the above indicators are clearly communicated to Google.

Google’s Recommended Video SEO Best Practices

Google recommends these 5 greatest practices for getting discovered and understood by search crawlers.

1. Make Video Publicly Accessible

The first step to getting movies found by Google is ensuring they’re accessible publicly on the net. That means the video ought to have a corresponding net web page with a URL that Google can entry.

A video additionally must be simply seen on a web page with out requiring complicated consumer actions to load.

2. Use Structured Data

To assist Google discover movies and perceive what they’re about, website house owners can present structured data utilizing Schema.org VideoObject markup.

The markup can embody info just like the video tile, description, period, thumbnail, video content material file URLs, and extra.

Additional structured knowledge can be utilized to allow particular search options, just like the “LIVE” video badge for reside streams.

3. Provide High Quality Thumbnails

Provide high-quality thumbnails for every video at URLs that Google can entry.

If a thumbnail isn’t accessible to Google the web page won’t be capable to seem in video options. For instance, if the thumbnail URL is blocked with robots.txt then Google wouldn’t be capable to entry it.

4. Submit a Video Sitemap

Video sitemaps are one other approach to assist Google discover video content material related to pages in your website.

A video sitemap may embody metadata tags to assist Google perceive what the movies are about.

5. Accessible Video Files

Make certain Google can fetch your video content material recordsdata so your pages are eligible for search options like video previews and key moments.

Video previews are a function in search outcomes the place Google grabs a couple of seconds from a video to make use of as a clip, which could be extra participating than a static thumbnail.

You can use the max-video-preview robots meta tag to manage the size of those previews.

When Google can analyze the content material of movies utilizing the file itself it will probably floor them for extra related queries.

For extra on video SEO greatest practices, see Google’s full presentation beneath: