Video content is one of the indispensable media elements for explaining your brand and the service you provide. In this article on on-site video optimization, we'll cover how you should position these videos on your website and on the YouTube platform, and how you should optimize them. Enjoy your reading!
When you add videos to your website, it is very likely that your site performance will improve. When visitors are informed about your product and your page, they are more likely to spend more time on your site, visit more pages, and generally engage more with your content.
But before you directly upload the video relevant to the page, make sure that the page is not negatively impacted:
Embed YouTube Video on a Page
It is very critical to embed videos on the page so that the video does not negatively affect the size of the page and the page loading speed. In addition, it is very rare for Google to rank the source media file for a video such as .mp4 or .avi. The search engine will almost always rank the page containing the embedded video, whether it is your web page or a channel on YouTube.
You can set features such as automatic video playback, annotations, the video's display size, and the second it starts at.
It's also very useful to use attributes such as lazyloading and async, which help page performance.
You can check Google's Embed videos & playlists resource for this process.
Optimization Recommendations by Page Type
Video Content Pages
You may have various blog, interview, newsletter, etc. pages on your website where videos are the main content. In that case, it can make sense to put your videos in the above-the-fold area. Showing Google that your video is the primary piece of content on your page will help with performance.
An example of a page positioned as a newsletter under the blog structure, where the main content is video:
To make sure our optimizations are in place for custom video pages, we should try to add the following features as much as possible:
- Page Title: This must be the same or very similar to the title of the video.
- H1: Must be the same as the title of the video or be edited to include it.
- Video Description: A summary of the video content written in a way that encourages users to watch the video.
- Video Transcript: The text of the video should be formatted so that users watching without sound, or with hearing impairments, can easily read it.
- Structured Data Markup: The page should have a video type defined using Schema.org markups.
Video transcripts are perhaps the most labor-intensive, but very important item in helping Google understand your webpage. They give search engines an idea of what your video is about and can potentially help boost your site's rankings, so it's very important not to skip this step.
https://moz.com/blog/how-to-explain-domain-authority
Pages with Videos as Supporting Content
For example, you might use a video on a sales page to walk through how you provide a service, step by step. Another example is a recipe site, where a video might show how to make a recipe step by step. When a video supports this kind of content rather than being the main focus, optimizing the page may take less effort than it does for pages where the video is the primary content. The video transcript may also need different treatment, so the content doesn't run too long.
For sales purposes, where the video supports the content rather than being the main focus, here's a sample page:
To optimize pages like this for video results, make sure the page has the following features:
- A video description or at least a title: Putting descriptive text next to the video helps users and search engines understand it.
- Video Transcript: This item requires a different optimization than the previous page type. Since the video is not the focal point of the page, a simpler transcript would be more appropriate here.
- Therefore, a few paragraphs of text at the end of the page will work and not distract from the main content.
- Structured Data Markup: As long as a page contains video, structured data markup for video should be used regardless of the page type.
Video Metadata and Structured Data Markup
Since Google can't yet track every video on the web, we need to optimize our videos to explain them and make it easier for Google to understand how we use them. One of the most important ways to optimize is structured data markup. In order for our pages to rank at all, it is necessary to add the VideoObject structured data markup type to our pages where videos are embedded.
An example of a VideoObject in the JSON-LD format
The required properties for the VideoObject structured data type are:
- Description: Written description of the video content. Reuse the video description from the page if it already exists.
- Name: The title of the video. Reuse the same on the page.
- Thumbnail URL: Every embedded video should already have a thumbnail. At this point, either reuse the image URL from the embed code or upload a thumbnail to use for this markup.
- Upload Date: The date the video was first published.
Other important properties recommended for VideoObject types:
- Content URL or Embed URL: If the video has a source media URL on the server or a custom URL that contains only a player for the video, add it here.
- Duration: The video's runtime is in ISO 8601 format.
In this article, we tried to explain many optimization methods related to On-Site Video Optimization. I hope it was a useful resource for everyone. See you in the next content!