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.

As SEOs and other search-aware people know, Google and Bing are constantly experimenting with changes to their search results.  So we were not surprised to see a change to the universal video results formatting in Google today.

Previously, Google’s universal video results were displayed side-by-side, in a 2-pack or 3-pack, as seen here in the search results for the query “how to braid hair”:

This morning, we’re observing universal video thumbnails shown vertically, one above the other.  Each video thumbnail includes full snippets:

Even before this change, video results were prominent on the page.  With this new look, video results have an even more dominant position, holding 4 out of 5 of the above-the-fold listings.

What does this mean for you?

2011 continues to bring major shifts in search result prominence.  Local results have gained massively in search real estate, and now we see the potential for a video results “land grab” as well.

Even if Google doesn’t choose to continue with this particular layout, the clear interest in video result positioning reinforces our longstanding recommendation that site owners pay attention to video optimization.  Basic strategies include:

• Consider an upload to YouTube if your video serves as an advertisement for your company, product, or service
• Optimize your YouTube page for keywords; used closed captioning if possible
• Make sure the videos on your site are crawlable and indexable.  If you’re using a video hosting service such as Brightcove or Bits on the Run, don’t worry, these videos can still be indexable on your own site.
• Display your videos separately on individual URLs
• Create and upload a Google Video Sitemap and Bing Video Sitemap or mRSS feed
• Optimize video pages for keywords; include a transcript if possible

Readers, what are you seeing?  Do you think Google will roll out this change across the boards, or is this just a temporary experiment?

Q: I’ve been hearing that I should add social media meta tags to my website.  What are these and what do they do?

A: Like everything else in the social marketing space, social media meta tags are evolving rapidly.

We recommend using the Open Graph format for social media meta tags.

Basic Tags

The basic meta tags are title, description, and image:

<meta property=”og:title” content=”The title of my page” />
<meta property=”og:description” content=”A description of my page” />
<meta property=”og:image” content=”http://www.example.com/thumbnail-location” />

Use these tags to specify the title, description and thumbnail image that appear when your page is shared in Facebook, as seen here:

Why use the tags?

If the OG tags aren’t present, then the share items will typically default to the page title (<title> tag), meta description, and images found on the page.  Will the defaults look OK most of the time?  Sure, but you may want to add a little more  pep to your social media descriptions.  For example, “I just watched this awesome video on ZappySite. Check it out!” could be a good social media description but wouldn’t make sense as a meta description.  The tags are also a great way to control which thumbnail image is selected for your page – and there is no need for the thumbnail to actually be displayed on the page.

Video tags and Facebook whitelisting

For pages containing Flash videos, you can use additional special video tags.  These tags look like the following:

<meta property=”og:video” content=”video url (.swf only)”/>
<meta name=”video_height” content=”300″/>
<meta name=”video_width” content=”400″/>
<meta name=”video_type” content=”application/x-shockwave-flash” />
<meta name=”medium” content=”video” />

To properly utilize video tags, your domain must be whitelisted with Facebook so that the video can play within the news stream in Facebook (request whitelisting here).   The combination of whitelisting and video tags will result in all shares of that page placing a video thumbnail (including play button) within the user’s news stream.

Video tags effectively override the standard “share” experience: people will no longer click on the link directly to your site.   Instead, they will stay within Facebook and play the video there.   This probably makes sense if your video serves as an advertisement for your company, or if going viral is your main goal.  If you would prefer for people to watch videos on your own site, this approach is not for you.

Video tags are also recognized by Google, and we have seen use of Open Graph video tags resulting in video thumbnails within Google’s listings.

Here, we’ve described the use of meta tags to control how your page looks when it is shared in Facebook.  In a future post, we’ll address other powerful features of social media tags.   Have a pressing social media question?  Ask us in the comments!

Not sure how to draw people to watch the videos on your website? Here’s our “right now” primer on video search!

There are two broad categories of video search: video sharing sites and video search engines. Generally speaking, video sharing sites allow content owners to upload videos, while video search engines index the videos from the Web, but do not host video content. Some video sites (such as YouTube) display search results only from within their own database, while others (such as Yahoo! Video Search) return results from both their hosted videos and outside websites. Many video search engines send out crawlers to index media content on the web, just like the “regular” search engines do for text content.

Video strategies can be boiled down into two approaches:

• uploading video for viewing on video sharing sites
• optimizing your video for crawling by video search engines, so that targeted traffic will visit your site to view your video content

Why would you choose one strategy over another? It’s about what you want to gain from your video content. If you care mostly about branding or “buzz”, you probably won’t mind uploading your video for the YouTube masses to see. But if you care more about people viewing ads on your website, it won’t benefit you to have your video viewed outside your site, and you’ll want your videos to be spidered and listed by a video search engine likeBlinkx.

Can you trust the video search engine spiders to find your content? We don’t think so, at least not yet. The good news is, many video search engines also accept RSS feeds from website owners.

Here’s a list of video search sites that you may want to explore for your own website:

Gravity Search Marketing’s Very Useful Video Search Submittal Chart

In our SEO book, we are very clear about the difference between the “right now” of SEO and the “eternal,” or more long-lasting, elements of SEO. Video search definitely belongs in the “right now” category. Video search engines are being bought, sold, launched, and shut down at a dizzying pace. Contact us if you have an updated link for this chart – we’d love to keep it current for our readers!

You might also be interested in learning about video search from the following sources:

• Robin Good’s Video Search Mini Guide
• Danny Sullivan’s excellent analysis and history of Video Search on Search Engine Land

If you love the Wild West, video search should be a blast for you. Good luck and Enjoy!

Welcome to the Banana Channel. We’re testing video RSS and video search optimization. Enjoy!

This is an SEO test page. We are learning how search engines index videos on the web. For more information please read How to Get Video Thumbnails in Google.

Check out our video MRSS feed

Video Pages:

• The Monkey Diaries V
• The Monkey Diaries II
• The Monkey Diaries IV

The day began quite normally for Monkey Subject R5-Q17 (otherwise known as Hooble). But as he scratched his furry beard and wondered “how will I ever get across this flooded jungle floor?,” the answer, he realized, was hydroplaning. A hydroplaning monkey? What a sight to behold.

There is currently limited information on hydroplaning monkeys in the wild. This page was created to fill this gap in our knowledge as a global community. Our dream is to form a hydroplaning monkey foundation so that this phenomenon can be studied more closely.

The Shocking Monkey Barnacles

4.0 stars out of 5.0

based on 11 reviews

For more information, please visit our Monkey Videos page. or enjoy our Monkey Videos feed! You can also put the Monkey in your Google Results!

Update: We’ve been receiving a lot of letters from monkey-lovers that are very concerned about Hooble’s well-being. We want to assure you that Hooble is doing just great. He’s decided to get rid of the furry beard and go with more of a goatee look for 2007; and we needed to put him on a little diet after a few too many monkey banana love orgies. But other than that, Hooble is entirely healthy and will certainly never be harmed or endangered in future hydroplaning experiments. We thank you for your concern.

Hoobie! You’ve been a bad monkey. No more monkey banana love orgies for you.

This is an SEO test page. We are learning how search engines index videos on the web. For more information please read How to Get Video Thumbnails in Google.

Enjoy more tests

Groovtastic Things
Awesomelyistic Stuff

Do you have extraordinary images or videos? Would you benefit from a wider audience? Use these links to help you assess the status of your images and upload your videos.

Please note: you can find revised and expanded information about video on our Video Search Engine Optimization page.

Google

• Search Google images here: http://images.google.com
• Search Google videos here: http://video.google.com
• To upload your videos, go to http://www.youtube.com
• The Google Video Help Center is here: http://www.google.com/support/youtube/

Google allows you to include a title and description for your videos, so take advantage of this by writing something compelling and keyword-rich!

Yahoo

• Search Yahoo! images here: http://search.yahoo.com/images
• Search Yahoo! videos here: http://video.search.yahoo.com/
• To upload your video (it’s free) do so here: http://video.yahoo.com/video/upload

You’ll need a Yahoo! account and you’ll also need to create a video-specific profile for yourself before you can upload a video. You can also include a transcript of your video and tags to describe it – remember to include your well-researched keywords! There is a file limit of 100 MB for uploaded files.

Bing

• Search Bing images here: http://www.bing.com/images
• Search Bing videos here: http://www.bing.com/videos/browse

Ask

• Search images on Ask here: http://www.ask.com/?tool=img