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Q: We have tons of great videos on our website. How can we get those little video thumbnails that sometimes show up in Google search results?
A: When Google understands that there is a video presented on a web page, it will often display a special thumbnail as part of the search result for that page, as shown here:
For the best chance at getting video thumbnails for your pages, you should embed videos on your site in a way that Google can easily recognize AND send Google as many signals as possible indicating that you have a video on the page. Here are some tips that can help:
- Include each video on a separate URL
- Embed your video in Quicktime or a standard Flash video player [Gravity has created a Video SEO test site to more fully understand how the embedding format affects video thumbnails, and will report our results here!]
- Create a Google Video Sitemap and submit it to Google Webmaster Tools: click here for Google’s video sitemap instructions.
- To add even more signals that Google can read, tag the videos using RDFa: click here for Google’s video RDFa instructions.
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