I've been testing a lot with video SEO lately, and I'll be doing a whole lot more of that testing, as video SEO seems to be a nice area to play in. Now I noticed my buddy Mark Robertson over at ReelSEO did a short, but nice interview with Matt Cutts on video sitemaps:
Now you're probably asking: what on earth's name does this stuff about video SEO have to do with WordPress? Well, it's quite simple: one of my upcoming WordPress SEO plugin's features will be to automatically generate video sitemaps, for video's added with several supported video plugins, like the awesome Viper's Video Quicktags.
So, for a preview of what will be able to do, check out my video sitemap, and try and search for some of the terms in there, you'll see my video's have started ranking nicely. There's a lot of voodoo involved and this needs a lot more testing, so don't expect this out tomorrow, but it is possible, and it will be available within a few (I'd say 2-3) months.
For those who missed it, I published a technical guide to Video SEO a couple days after this post!
Just a head's up -- I'm currently working on v7.0 of my plugin. It'll be a total rewrite and while it will still support the
[youtube]-style of embedding, I'll be overall moving towards using the native embeds feature. My plugin will enhance and clean up the result of the oEmbed request and customize it to your needs.In short, my plugin will handle URL-on-it's-own-line style,
[embed]style (this will likely be the recommended method), and the classic (deprecated maybe?)[youtube]site specific shortcodes.If you want an alpha build to play with, shoot me and e-mail and I'll send it your way. :)
Oh wow. I'd never heard of video site maps before. As a video producer, I am _very_ interested. I use Blip.TV to host my videos... it sure would be nice if your plugin supported blip.tv (as many don't).
@ Dave Holowiski: Viper's Video Quicktags supports Blip.tv. Therefore, I think it is safe to assume that Yoast's plugin will support it as well.
I've used Viper for years and it's cool to see that you'll be supporting this and real excited about the pending SEO plugin release, Joost!
If you ever need a beta tester... ;)
I was under the impression that in order to have a video sitemap you had to host the videos in your own server, however, I can see that you have your videos in youtube and reference their location in your site via your videos sitemap, am I right? thank you in advance
Not needed indeed, so yes you're right :)
Can't wait! I've been looking for a wordpress integrated vsp solution, this week, that doesn't require a subscription or an insanely high cost plugin for this one function!
Any estimate on the release date?
Ignore that last question of mine, I saw your answer. Looking for someone to help you test it?
Yea! this is cool bro. I am really waiting for the plugin it will be free or paid ?
Nice plugin! Can't wait to get it into use.
will be nice to have a plugin that will do this, im cureently using a premium plugin (paid) to do video sitemaps, would be a nice to see a free version ;)
@Chris, which one do you use?
this one
http://googlevideositemap.com/
I use that one also and just got an upgarde but looks like yoast will support 3rd video sharing.
@yoast, please give me an example of the keyword to see the ranking
try "wordpress seo video" for instance.
Love it, want it now!! This will be an SEO powerhouse to say the least :))
This is a great post about WordPress video SEO ...thank you, Joost! I am still trying to figure out better ways to tag the specific timeline of a video for each event. Any ideas?
I totally get that I need Video Site Maps for SEO. But what do we do if we want our YouTube videos that are embedded to show up in searches?
Thanks! Plus I'm trying to do a link to my site! Is that cool? I'm getting the hang of actual good
back links...
- Mary Cary
Video Blog Marketing
No the link like that was not cool :) It came across as spammy to me :) Anyhow, more on the ranking with embedded youtube video's thing later, doing some research on the topic.
Sorry for the linky? I'm reading about that right now and realize its not the right way... not sure what the right way is yet!!! Getting great search results anyway, but I hear that linking is actually like 2/3 of your seo? How can that be when I'm terrible with it and still have good results!!!
SORRY :)
xoxo
Mary (real person/spider-bot)!!! haha
This looks terrific - I am currently using the FLV Embed plugin as I balked at paying $97 for the Google Video Sitemap plugin that looked like it did the exact same thing.
But given that you don't have to host on your own server and with the added tags and date your new plugin looks the "goods". Can't wait for it to be released!
Looks a gread plug-in we are looking too into Hypervideo http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypervideo
and were looking more in the direction of HTML5 and testing with with http://www.coincident.tv/
can your plug-in deal with this?
Not currently, though I'd certainly be open to adding those, the way it's built, adding video methods shouldn't that much work :)
There is already a plugin like this, but it's not free unfortunately (http://bit.ly/c0vSNU). Glad someone's making a WP spirited plugin (i.e. free!). Looking forward to yours!
oops, just realised someone linked to it above too :)
I'm afraid that it's not going to be free, though it is going to be GPL, but I can't do free for a plugin this big (it's more code already then all my other plugins combined), and still maintain it properly.
fair enough, as a plugin dev I can sympathize :)
given your other quality plugins I still look forward to it!
Your SEO plugin sounds very great Joost. I have several hundred videos on my website, so an automatically generated video sitemap would be a huge help to me. (If you need beta testers I would be happy to assist you).
However I noticed you said it works with several video plugins such as "Viper's Video Quicktags". What if we don't use video plugins but rather do things manually with embed code. I use the popular "JW Player" flash player along with a custom field "video" which has just the video filename (that way I can easily update the flash player dimensions/style across all videos at once for example). Hopefully your plugin would still be able to work on a setup like this?
Hi Sean, sounds like an interesting idea to support that. Some questions though: if you only link to a video file in the meta of your page, you do not create a "poster" or "thumbnail" image? (A sitemap can work without it, so it shouldn't be too much of a problem, but it does mean you can't optimize the click through ratio...)
Yes, I do indeed use poster image (a custom field "image" which I forgot to mention in my comment). Also my videos are hosted on a external server/CDN (Amazon S3) which I'm sure is fairly common amongst video sites. So that is another thing to think about...
Hopefully you are able to support JW Player for this plugin since it's one of the most popular flash players. Thanks for looking into it!
@yoast Thanks for the responses. I ended up doing a Google search for joost [thinking I am searching for Yoast]and went to the video site and thought 'oh my God, that sneak Yoast has transformed his site into a video site to exploit his new plugin and get ahead of the game' lol.
I am keen to pay now whilst in beta and build a custom site on thesis and a new skin dedicated to tech stuff and video. i think it will be an excellent example of the use of this plugin and a real demo that you can use that will be outstanding.
I do not want to wait 2/3 months and I would rather not use the paid one I have now since it does not support 3rd party sharing sites which would be a hugh disadvantage for traffic at a site like youtube.
let me know?
Joost, I'm really glad you're focusing on video sitemaps. As you work on your plugin, do you think it'd make sense to have it either integrate with the Google XML sitemaps plugin OR totally replace that plugin? [Totally replacing is probably easier.]
At the moment, most of us are stuck with adding videos to the generated sitemap manually.
Fabulous! Once again . . .something I hadn't thought about needing that I need to do. Probably need a very long list for each wordpress site I build or coach. Thanks for sharing. Video is the wave of the future.
As a company that creates IT Certification Training videos, this sounds like it's going to be a GREAT plugin. You really do some amazing work, thanks for all your contributions to the WordPress community!
If you need people to test the plugin, please let me know, I'd be glad to be an additional beta tester..
Wow. This is awesome. I'll be checking back for more info. Thanks!
Sweet! As with @Dave above, I too, am a video producer and I've been researching video sitemaps and looking to integrate it into my website relaunch that will include plenty of original video. As always, good news from Joost!
Randy
Wanderism.com
Ey Randy,
cool stuff, glad to hear you appreciate it. As always: you can hire me if you need help ;)
Cheers
Cool! Incorporating Video sitemap with Worpress plugins will be great. Thanks for this heads up.
Will your video sitemap support accessible features like captioning and transcripts?
The real question is when is Google going to be able to crawl the actual content of a video?? when this happens, it will create a whole new ball game.
My guess is that that'll take a while. At one point they'll be able to do it, but whether they'll have the processing power anytime soon to do that for all video on, for instance, youtube, is something entirely different.