How To Use Schema.org Markup for Your Videos

by Dean Marsden on 12th March 2012

If you are new to Schema.org markup, you are not alone. Schema.org is a joint project between Search Engine giants Google, Bing, Yahoo! and Yandex so it is fast becoming an important addition to your website to help your content get indexed.

In summary it provides clear structured information to the search engine spiders about rich content such as events, people, places, products, reviews and media content.  A full list of current Schema.org types can be found here.

What I’m going to recommend in this blog post is using the VideoObject item to provide search engines with the information to be able to show the videos on your website in the search results in a well formatted manner. For example:

Adding the HTML to your video files is relatively easy, say your video code just has the video embed code something like this:

<h2>My Great Video</h2>

<object classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" >
<param name="movie" value="http://www.mywebsite.com/my-video.swf">
<param name="quality" value="high">
<param name="play" value="true">
<embed src="http://www.mywebsite.com/my-video.mp4" type="application/x-shockwave-flash">
</embed>
</object>

<p>This video was made to illustrate how cookies taste so good.</p>

The example below shows how it might look with the Schema.org  markup added:

<div itemprop="video" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/VideoObject">
<h2><span itemprop="name">My Great Video</span></h2>

<meta itemprop="duration" content="T1M30S" />
<meta itemprop="thumbnailURL" content="http://www.mywebsite.com/my-video-thumbnail.jpg" />
<meta itemprop="contentURL" content="http://www.mywebsite.com/my-video.flv" />
<meta itemprop="embedURL" content="http://www.mywebsite.com/my-video.swf" />
<meta itemprop="uploadDate" content="2011-07-05T08:00:00+08:00" />
<meta itemprop="expires" content="2012-01-30T19:00:00+08:00" />
<meta itemprop="width" content="640" />
<meta itemprop="height" content="480" />
<object classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000">
<param name="movie" value="http://www.mywebsite.com/my-video.swf">
<param name="quality" value="high">
<param name="play" value="true">
<embed src="http://www.mywebsite.com/my-video.flv"type="application/x-shockwave-flash">
</embed>
</object>

<p><span itemprop="description">This video was made to illustrate...</span></p>
</div>

It is important to include the required VideoObject properties as described in the table below. There are also a few optional VideoObject properties.

With the new Schema.org VideoObject properties you can easily specify the details of your video for a richer search engine listing. Although the search engines used to do an OK job of picking out the video and using the page title and content to add details to the search engine listing, we previously used video sitemaps to indicate what these were as well as what videos were on a website.

Google still highly recommends creating an XML video sitemap to provide additional video information and submitting it to them so they discover all of the  video content available on your website. Video sitemaps can be quite time consuming to create unless you use automated software, so at least you can give your videos a better chance of being correctly indexed using this new Schema.org markup.

One of the major advantages I can see with being able to add VideoObject properties to your HTML is being able to accurately describe each video on a single page with multiple videos. Previously with video sitemaps it was difficult get multiple videos on the same page indexed correctly, and if you have HTML access to your pages, adding the Schema.org markup offers an easier, more reliable and widely accepted standard.

Don’t forget to test all of your Schema.org markup using Google’s Rich Snippet testing tool. More information on Schema.org for Videos can be found on Google’s Webmaster EDU site and in this announcement.