SEO in Vidyard: an overview
Search Engine Optimization or SEO can be defined as the process to increase the online visibility of web pages within search engine results, generated by providers such as Google, Yahoo! and Bing.
There are 3 key areas, relative to improving SEO with Vidyard. These are SEO Metatags, Hubs and Sharing Pages.
To receive the most page visits, you will want to see relevant video content as high as possible in the search engine results. Achieving this isn’t as straightforward as a page with text.
This is because search engines cannot watch your videos when crawling web pages for content to index. Therefore, adding contextual information about your videos in a format that can be read by a crawler, will enable the video to be located via the search engine being used.
SEO Metatags
When the SEO metatags feature is switched on, all your current and future embed codes will gather the information about your player’s content and inject it into the <head> section of the webpage where the players live. This is in a web (schema.org) compliant format called JSON-LD, used to structure the video metadata and is recognized by the crawlers. This metadata is not seen on your webpage unless you enter the browser’s developer tools, so it won’t clutter up the page or decrease load times.
There are a number of metadata fields within the JSON-LD object, but the ones that you may wish to adjust are the name, description and tags – tags are listed as keywords. These are all set at the player level. The transcript is the only one that is delivered from the individual video level.
See our documentation for a detailed explanation of SEO Metatags.
You will find that automatic English transcripts are available on each video – you’ll just need to publish these in order to take effect for SEO Metatags.
Summary
Turning SEO Metatags on from within the Feature Store is a simple way to increase the visibility of your videos to a search engine web crawler.
That being said, you do need to rely on the web crawlers to reach the pages to index the content, which can take time on large websites and the results that you wish for cannot always be guaranteed.
Although SEO Metatags can be enough to get your video listed in Search Engine Results Pages, it’s recommended to support this with a Video Sitemap.
Video Hubs
As a default, any new hubs are not enabled for Search Engine indexing.
Having Search Engine indexing disabled will ensure that a hub with company confidential videos will not be listed on Google during the setup process.
Search Engine Indexing can be changed in the general settings of your hub. This setting will add or remove the XML sitemap in the robots.txt file that Vidyard generates automatically on the hub’s subdomain.
See our documentation for more information about how to set up Video Hubs.
Sharing Pages
You have the ability to enable search engine indexing in the settings for your sharing page.
When disabled, Search Engine Indexing will add a ‘noindex’ metadata to the head of your sharing pages. This will tell any web crawlers that come onto one of your sharing pages that you do not wish for it to be indexed.
This can be useful if you only wish for indexing to take place on your main website. It is possible that a web crawler might index your sharing pages if another page contains a link to them. Keeping it disabled will help prevent that from happening if you so wish.
See our documentation for more information about how to set up sharing pages.