Despite being around for several years, Video SEO is still a highly valuable part of technical SEO. In this tutorial, I’m going to share how I combine both Schema.org markup and a Video XML Sitemap to increase the visibility of my JW Player videos within the SERPS.
I would start by stressing, that there is more to ‘Video SEO’ than just the technical implementation of the Schema.org markup and XML sitemap I’m going to explain. JW Player themselves, have a free great whitepaper that covers everything from self-hosting to transcripts that are also worth considering.
However in this article, I’m going to dive straight into the coding configuration that I use for ranking JW Player videos with the supporting video thumbnail and semantic Structured Data.
Schema.org Markup
The first part is integrating the additional Schema.org markup with the default JW Player embed code:
In my code Gist above, you’ll notice I’m using the existing Div placeholder to add and hold my recommended Schema.org markup. You can use meta tags to hold most of the information, however you will need visible tags such as headings or spans to contain the title and description like in my example.
Once you’ve implemented and edited your Schema.org markup, I’d recommended testing the Data in Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool.
Create a Video XML Sitemap
Whilst SERP thumbnails and video SEO can be achieved with the Schema.org markup alone, I’d recommend supporting the code with a Video XML Sitemap. Google have a great article for webmasters on creating them, however here’s my recommended code to support our video markup above:
Submitting your Sitemap
Once you’ve created your XML Video Sitemap, you can submit the file to Google directly in Google Webmaster Tools. I’d recommend testing your sitemap’s content first, and once valid, submit the sitemap to the index:
In my example above, you can see how my Video XML Sitemap was indexed just two days after I submitted it. The key advantage of providing a supporting XML Sitemap to Google means that you can request your content to be indexed quicker than waiting for Google’s spiders to come back around and crawl the page naturally.
From the horse’s mouth
And that’s it! I’ve used these two techniques for both JW Player versions 5 and 6, and the combination works quickly and perfectly. Here’s a 50 second video from Google covering both the structured data and XML sitemap approach: