Making your Video Content Indexable

Internet search engines provide end-users a quick and easy to use way to get access to information available on the Internet. As more and more Internet content is multimedia, you need to ensure that your content is properly indexed by the search engines so that users can discover it. This article will provide an overview of how to enable your video content to be SEO enabled and indexed by the various search engines (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft).
There is a standard document, called a sitemap, that search engine indexers look for when examining your site. This document concisely tells the search engines what content is exposed on your site, the metadata for that content, and where that content is located on your site. A sitemap is an XML file that follows a standard specification.
There are two different flavors of sitemaps that you can (and should) create:

• Sitemap – A sitemap that will index your content in the standard text based search engines such as www.google.com or search.yahoo.com
• Video Sitemap – A sitemap that will index your content in media-centric search engines such as video.google.com

Note that both of these sitemaps index the metadata about your video content and provide links to end-users. The difference is where the metadata that is indexed is obtained from and how the content is surfaced in search results.
A proper SEO strategy for your video content will include creating both a standard sitemaps as well as a video sitemap. From a priority perspective, you want to create a standard Sitemap first and then a Video Sitemap.

Standard Sitemaps

Sitemaps follow the sitemap specification that is defined here: www.sitemaps.org. The purpose of the sitemap file is to provide a list of URLs on your site to the search engines. The only other information associated with a URL is when the page was last modified and how frequently the page changes. Note, there is no metadata about your content in this index. Because the sitemap is page-centric, we need to create a model where each video in your library will have a unique page, or URL, associated with it. This can be accomplished by having a single page whose behavior and content can be dynamically changed by passing in different query parameters to the page. For example, if you have a URL like http://www.example.com/video.html?videoId=123, you would have the video.html page look for the videoId query parameter (videoId=123) and modify the contents of the page returned to the browser to contain information about the video with id 123. This would be done on the server-side of your application where the page would look for the ID and then use the Video Cloud Media APIs to fetch metadata about the video and write it into the page.

For the purposes of this article, we assume that there is a single landing page on your site which can be used to play back all video content for your site. Different query parameters will be passed to the page to tell the page what video to play back and what video to surface metadata for. For example, let's say you have a page that displays the contents of an entire playlist and queues up a specific video in a player. You tell the page what playlist to display metadata for via a bclid query parameter and what video to surface in a player via the bctid parameter. Thus, what we want to do is create a URL for every unique playlist and video id combination.
Here is an example of sitemap that will be created:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
   <url>
      <loc>http://www.example.com/video?bclid=345&bctid=123</loc>
      <lastmod>2008-01-01</lastmod>
      <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
   </url>
   <url>
      <loc>http://www.example.com/video?bclid=12&bctid=544</loc>
      <lastmod>2008-03-01</lastmod>
      <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
   </url>
</urlset>

Google Video Sitemaps

A video sitemap is similar in concept to the standard sitemap file; there will be an entry in this sitemap file per video in your account. In fact, a video sitemap uses the sitemap schema as its base and adds additional tags specific to video metadata.
We won't go through the meaning of every element in the video sitemap file, but we do want to touch upon two elements: <video:content_loc> and <video:player_loc>. According to the video sitemap specification:

You must provide one of either the <video:content_loc> or <video:player_loc>

The video:content_loc element would be used to provide a reference to your video file (FLV or MP4) directly. We don't want to do this for several reasons:

• If you use FMS for streaming, the video sitemap specification does not allow you to reference these files directly; you can only use HTTP.
• If Google surfaces your content directly in the results page, you want to make sure it is played back through your player to keep all of your analytics, advertising, and branding with your content.

For these reasons, we want to use the video:player_loc element rather than video:content_loc. This will point to a Single Video Player from the Video Cloud system via the Player URL publishing code. We can pass different video IDs to this player to play, using the bctid query parameter. We don't restrict this player to a particular domain and thus will allow it to be directly embedded in the search results.

Here is an example of the video sitemap that will be created:

<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:content_loc>http://www.site.com/video123.flv</video:content_loc>
      <video:player_loc allow_embed="yes">http://www.site.com/videoplayer.swf?video=123</video:player_loc>
      <video:thumbnail_loc>http://www.example.com/thumbs/123.jpg</video:thumbnail_loc>
      <video:title>Grilling steaks for summer</video:title>  
      <video:description>Get perfectly done steaks every time</video:description>
      <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:family_friendly>yes</video:family_friendly>
      <video:duration>600</video:duration>
    </video:video>
</url>
</urlset>

Conclusion

A complete SEO strategy for your video content should include creating both a standard sitemap as well as a video sitemap. This will ensure that your content is indexed across the widest swath of search engines. Additionally, your content will be surfaced in the most aesthetically pleasing manner for the point of discovery. This article has outlined an approach for providing a unique URL per video and samples for generating the sitemap files that the engines will index.