A Video is a recording, reproducing or broadcasting of moving visual images. Now a day’s videos are used as promotional tools for various product and services online.

As a result of this the online video consumption has grown very high. Video has become an important section of attracting online customers all over the world.

So it is very important to optimize your videos. Videos can appear in Google Search results, video search results, Google Images, and Google Discover.

What is Video SEO?

To optimize a video to make it eligible to appear higher position in google search results is called video seo.

Video SEO is implementing certain task to a video to make it search engine friendly to rank it on higher position.

While searching in search engines, the search engine result pages (SERPS) provides video results in ALL tab and VIDEO tab.

The following are five key tips to optimize your videos.

• Make your videos available on the web.
• Provide structured data with VideoObject markup.
• Include high-quality thumbnails.
• Submit a video sitemap.
• Make video content files accessible.

Make your videos available on the web

Currently the online visitor is more eager to go to the video result on the search engine result pages. It becomes easy for the online visitor to understand the information in the form of video.

 Globally online video consumption has been increased.

So it is very important to make such video so that google find it easily and index it very fast to make it available for the online users.

 The video present on a web page should be available publically.

• The web page having videos is not blocked by robots.txt or noindex metadata.
• Use of proper HTML tags around the video i.e. <video>, <embed>, <iframe>, or <object>. Google identifies a video more easily with the help of these HTML tags.

Provide structured data with VideoObject markup

Structured data of a video described with VideoObject markup provide information of content of a video.

With the help of this google understand about the content of the video and feature this video in response to a query related to content of the video.

 So it is expected to provide exact true information related to the content of the video.

Although Google collects all the details about your video automatically yet you can explicitly provide this information with VideoObject markup.

The structured data provides the following various details of a video. Make sure to use unique thumbnails, titles, and descriptions for each video on your site.

• Description
• Thumbnail URL
• Upload date
• Duration

To implement videoObject markup visit video structured data.

Include high-quality thumbnails

A thumbnail image is necessary for a video to be eligible to appear in google video features. It should be a valid thumbnail image otherwise google index it to appear as plain blue link.

A valid thumbnail image can be created by providing by any one of the supported ways.

• If you’re using the <video> HTML tag, specify the poster attribute.
• In a video sitemap, specify the <video:thumbnail_loc> tag.
• In structured data, specify the thumbnailUrl property.

Google itself can generate a thumbnail image for you if you allow google to do so.

Size: The size of thumbnails image should be Minimum 60×30 pixels, larger preferred.

Supported thumbnail formats:

• BMP
• GIF
•  JPEG
•  PNG
•  WebP
•  SVG

Submit a video sitemap

A sitemap is a file which contains all pages of a website. Sitemaps play an important role to index content to google.

So it’s a one of the most important activity as far as SEO is concerned to a web page.

The sitemap of a website contains links of all WebPages of the website. The content of the page may be in various forms i.e. texts, images or videos.

• Create a separate sitemap for videos.
• The structure of each sitemap entry is as follows

<url>

  <loc>https://example.com/mypage</loc>      <!– URL of host page –>

  <video> … information about video 1 … </video>

  … as many additional <video> entries as you need …

</url>

• Each sitemap file must have no more than 50,000 URL elements.
• Submit multiple sitemaps and a sitemap index file if you have more than 50,000 URL elements.
• All sitemaps must be accessible to Googlebot.
• Submit your sitemap in the Search Console Sitemaps tool.

Make video content files accessible

Google fetches the video file itself to understand the video contents and enable features like video previews and key moments.

It becomes easy to allow google to fetch your video content by following best practices.

• Use structured data to provide the contentURL value in a supported file format.
• Don’t block Google from fetching the video’s streaming file bytes. For example, don’t block the video content URL or domain with the noindex tag or robots.txt file.
• The video host page and the server streaming the actual video must have the bandwidth to be crawled. So if your landing page at example.com/puppies.html has an embedded puppies video served by somestreamingservice.com, both example.com and somestreamingservice.com must be accessible to Google and have available server load
• The video file must be available at a stable URL.