How To Use Schema.org Markup for Your Videos

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.orgmarkup 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>
cs today