Blog Archives: September 2012
Video Metadata Practices to Boost SEO
by Meagan Palatino on 2012-09-26 14:51
Metadata is best described as data about your data. In the context of the internet, it is a quick reference (or key word) used to help describe the larger concept of your web page content. It comes in the form of descriptive titles, text, keywords, and dates.
Web page metadata has been used by web developers and designers for quite some time now. More recently, the importance of metadata in the context of online video has been recognized. So what should this mean for your videos? Read on and find out...
Video Metadata
Video metadata is already indexed by search engines organically, but human-authored video metadata can optimize your content indexing. Metadata is also preserved when a user downloads your video file. As discussed in this support forum thread, if Google can understand the content on your web pages (including images & video), they are better able to create "rich snippets" - or detailed information - that better distribute your content among search results.
In the context of video, metadata covers the title, the subject matter (in the form of a description), relevant categorical tags, the desired publication date, the video length, dimensions, thumbnail, and the video author. Word on the street is that after Google's latest search algorithm update, "Penguin" (released in April 2012), page and video metadata are even more pivotal in giving proper credit to the quality content on your site. Sharp and clear metadata helps Google recognize that your site is valid, and follows general SEO best practices. This means that your video metadata should accurately describe the content within each video. If the description doesn't match the content, you may be penalized.
As we pointed out in our previous post on Building a Video Sitemap, consistent metadata can improve your content indexing in search engines, such as Google. This means ensuring that the metadata in the headers of your page jive with the title, description and tags of the video embedded on the page. Conflicting page & video metadata can actually confuse search engines about the content of your page.
Video sitemaps give you flexibility to tell Google which content you wish to be indexed, giving you more control than with an organic search algorithm. They also allow you to choose how your videos are listed, and define what metadata is most relevant to your video, optimizing search results. Read more about this in one of our recommended resources for video sitemaps.
As pointed out by the team at ReelSEO, if you use public video hosting sites such as YouTube, your video files & existing metadata will be transcoded by YouTube's server and your video metadata stripped. Thus, it is recommended you host your own videos, or use a third-party video content management tool, such as LongTail Video's Bits on the Run, which offers a free tier for its users.
New Improvements in Video Metadata
The HTML5 track element
Recently, the HTML5 track element, has appeared as a potential game-changer for video metadata. In addition to adding support for captions and subtitles in HTML5 video, the track element allows publishers to attach a rich array of textual metadata to their videos.
This can improve page interaction around video playback - where developers can synchronize metadata descriptions of the content within a video with other dynamic content on the webpage. Search engines can also utilize the contextual information to return search results corresponding to particular points within the video itself. In addition, search engines can leverage the subtitles and foreign-language translations created using the track element to better index foreign content - opening up search results & making our internet world even flatter.
As discussed in our previous blog post, the track element is still in a rudimentary phase, but something to look out for in the near future.
Schema.org
Schema.org is a site/tool that defines a standard of markup syntax for webmasters to optimize their site’s metadata for better recognition by search engines, such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo. For video, schema.org defines a large list of properties for precisely describing the media file in your video player. They range from the obvious (description, title) to more eccentric metadata (videoFrameSize, requiresSubscription).
Some of the many descriptive properties are:
- Audience – intended audience for the video (video viewers)
- Award - An award won by this person or for this creative work
- isFamilyFriendly – Indicates whether this content is family friendly
- bitrate – the bitrate of the media object
- uploadDate - the date the video was first published
The properties listed at schema.org help define video content at a greater granularity than with more traditional metadata. As part of the group that helped to define the descriptive vocabulary, Google’s developer documentation recommends using ">schema.org on-page markup for video (they also list some great visual examples of what the markup looks like on your webpage html). By leveraging schema.org markup to describe a video on your webpage you will improve the indexing of your video content, and hopefully increase their relevance in search results.
Bits on the Run & Video Metadata
Our own video content management system, Bits on the Run, allows you to add video metadata upon video upload (both from our desktop dashboard & our mobile applications).
Metadata stored and managed within Bits on the Run includes: title, description, tags, thumbnails, author, date, webpage url, and any custom metadata you feel is relevant. While the standard Bits on the Run video embeds are set up for Google to properly pull the metadata from your videos if set, it is also possible to push new videos to Google, improving the speed and accuracy of search results. We have a built-in tool that allows you to submit your video urls directly to Google. This is done by setting the "link" property in your video metadata to the website's page that the video sits on. Read more on how to implement this feature from your Bits on the Run Account.
So how can you leverage Bits on the Run's built-in video metadata features?
- Add a clear and accurate title upon video upload.
- Add a succinct description upon video upload.
- Add relevant tags to categorize your video upon upload.
- After metadata is clear, and final, use our built-in tool to submit your videos directly to Google's search engine.
- Add advanced metadata such as video author, date, and any custom data you feel relevant.
- Make sure you have an accurate & captivating video thumbnail, as this is often what will appear to viewers in search results. It's like the cover of a book.
Stay tuned for more exciting tools from LongTail Video, especially as we built out our tools to leverage the new HTML5 track element. Feel free to send us any suggestions, questions, feature requests in the comments section below.
FOMS 2012 Recap: Here Come The Text Tracks!
by Jeroen Wijering on 2012-09-06 10:15
FOMS (Foundations of Open Media Software) is an annual unconference for media engineers, known for its attitude of getting things done. This year's edition - held in Paris, France - again had a great mix of attendees representing codec manufacturers, media frameworks, web browsers and video players.
Text Tracks
On the web browser side, the biggest topic was the implementation of
At FOMS, both Opera and Chrome demoed working text track implementations. For Opera, this functionality will probably ship with version 12.5, while Chrome users have to wait until version 23. Safari 6 and Internet Explorer 10 will have
Despite all the progress and working implementations, the WebVTT specification is not yet done. Current outstanding issues are the implementation of roll-up captions (for live broadcasting, like this example) and the ability to store CSS in WebVTT - for players like VLC or Flash, who cannot access the webpage. Both items were heavily discussed during the workshop and proposals for implementation were filed with W3C.
Beyond Captions
Though captions in themselves are great, HTML5 Text Tracks can do a lot more. At FOMS, we saw several demos to show applications of WebVTT beyond captions. The demos we presented are listed below.
Note: you need a browser with text track support to see the demos:
- Chapter Markers: this demo prints chapter markers on an alternative seek bar for the video. When clicking a marker, the browser seeks to the start of that chapter.
- Audio Descriptions: in this demo, a description track adds audio descriptions to a video. In an ARIA-live compatible client (like Chrome with ChromeVox), the descriptions are read out loud, in sync with the video.
- Preview Thumbs: these thumbnails, known from Hulu and YouTube, pop-up when hovering the seek bar. The thumbs are implemented using a JPG sprite and a WebVTT file that links to the individual thumbs with an xywh fragment query.
- Page Interaction: in this demo, related artworks are displayed for certain ranges of the video. This kind of video-page interaction, now easily implemented, has many applications (PowerPoint presentations, sports statistics, etc).
- Timeline Search: this demo allows you to search the text tracks of a video to retrieve in-video search results. Widespread use of WebVTT will likely lead to search engines applying this trick on a much larger scale.
Other Developments
Another interesting subject at FOMS was the implementation of adaptive streaming in JavaScript. A team of Chrome engineers presented a new demo of the Media Source API, which allows the appending of arbitrary chunks of video to an already playing stream. As we noted in our HTML5 progress update last year, web developers can use this API to create adaptive streaming applications, using fMP4 or WebM video fragments (TS may be coming too, for anyone interested in building HLS support in HTML5). The API can be enabled in Chrome 23 using chrome://flags.
Many other interesting developments, like the new OPUS audio codec and EME content protection scheme, were covered. The FOMS website contains the detailed notes for all of our sessions. In summary, it became clear at FOMS 2012 that so much is going on in the open media scene, and many great tools are yet to come.
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