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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 thumbnail as part of the search result for that page, as shown here:
(The exact layout of your results may vary, since Google is constantly tweaking its video result display.)
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. Google can’t crawl through a complicated Flash file, so if you use Flash, so we suggest using the built-in Flash video component for FLV playback using a hard coded URL path to the FLV streaming source (it’s OK if this is an off-domain location).
- 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.
- Use Video OG tags. These are intended for social media, but Google sees them too, and we’ve seen clear evidence that Google will recognize video information in OG tags. See more about how to use Facebook OG tags.
- It is OK to host your videos on streaming service such as Brightcove. However, you will probably be on your own when it comes to generating a video sitemap or well-formatted OG tags.
Video SEO is changing fast! About two years ago, video thumbnails were dominated by YouTube and Metacafe. These days, YouTube still has a dominant role, but other domains are presented among the featured thumbnails more and more. Watch this blog for updates in this quick-moving space.
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Good introduction to the subject – I will definately check out the RDFa and OG tags
This is exactly what i needed to know. Thanks for this, gonna get video thumbnails thanks to you