Rich Snippets - Videos in Search Results - Using Wordpress - Meta Tags? Help me!

Hey Guys,

I have several videos on the front page of Google, is there a plug in or easy way to add custom meta tags for individual posts? For example Google uses Facebooks meta tags to grab your rich snippets (videos) from your site and gives you a pretty little thumbnail and video details next to your results in Google - imagine having a little thumb next to your results in Google (that has to boost traffic).

Here's the simple code that Google uses based on Facebook Share Meta Data:

Property: Description
image_src (Required.): A URL pointing to a preview thumbnail, which must be a GIF, PNG, or JPG image. The preview thumbnail must be hosted on the same domain as the video.
video_src (Required.): A URL to the video to play when the user clicks the "play" button.
medium: Indicates the type of content being shared. Valid values are audio, image, video, news, blog and mult.
video_width :The video's width in pixels, including any "chrome" provided by the third-party player.
video_height: The video's height in pixels, including any "chrome" provided by the third-party player.
video_type: The video's MIME-type. Currently, the only acceptable value is application/x-shockwave-flash.
description: A short (up to 200 characters) description of the video.
title: The title of a video. Up to 60 characters.

I already use the Facebook Share Plugin (Facebook Open Graph protocol plugin v1.4)

By default this add's the tidy thumbnail, description and title - but it's only for sharing and likes etc. to display as a tidy result.

How do I manually add The Video data, the medium, the height and width, to each post manually - I don't mind adding them manually with each post.

Can you simply use the extra fields provided in the post section? Is there a plugin to handle this?

I have Google and searched for Meta Plugins and it's all a little over whelming...

Cheers...

 

Hi, I found a plugin earlier especially for this on the wordpress plugin site, ive just tried searching my browser history for the name for you, but cant seem to find it. Its out there tho! Good luck

 

Oh is there... I was hoping that I could do this within a post, but wordpress cleans the tags from posts, I looked into schema.org - all they have is instructions for html etc. http://schema.org/VideoObject - not quite what I need... The facebook plugin kind of works - Facebook Open Graph protocol plugin v1.5.2 - but it's not an option for rich video snippets... It's a pain in the ass and I believe it's something we all need to move forward in S.E development.

Thanks anyway!!

 

you would have thought that things like this would be made so much easier, and info on things like this so much more accessible, but obviously not

 

I know especially with wordpress - wordpress is a leader in new developments... I was thinking about adding custom fields in the wordpress post options, but I was confused with the meta functions and ways to incorporate the rich snippets needed into the custom fields... it's easy if you have a simple HTML page - http://schema.org/VideoObject - like the examples provided there... but how to incorporate that into a wordpress post? As I previously mentioned - rich snippets also uses "Facebook Share Meta Data"... but again there's no clear guide for wordpress.

 

Dude. Everything you described is what You Tube does. Am I missing something?
Combined with All In One SEO if you need the individual post info.

There's a ton of WordPress video plug ins, but you don't even need them.

I must be missing something.

 

You are correct, youtube does this and so do some of the video sites and blogs... they return a video thumb next to search results in Google - but they use the video rich snippets code in their sites (meta entries) to achieve this... is that what you mean? I use the All in One SEO plugin - but it doesn't have options for video length, rating, video size, the video category, the video thumb to be used in Google results etc. These are all features that you can utilize... The SEO plugin just has title, description and tags - but I may be wrong.

Here's a cool tutorial that I just found (for/from JWPlayer) and I will examine this later today (when I am not busy): http://www.longtailvideo.com/support/jw-player/22/making-video-accessible

Here's some sample code (wordpress strips these from posts):

For Title and Length:

The thumb and video file meta data for rich snippets (example of):

That's what I am talking about...

 

For the record I have found (possibly a solution) for wordpress: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/jw-player-plugin-for-wordpress/

External Video embedding is also available...

JW Player: http://www.longtailvideo.com/suppor...lugin-for-wordpress-media-management#external

and I quote:

Finally... I will install and see if it works... can take a long time for Google to update the video listings within Google (search results) to display an image with rich snippets...

 

So what you need is something that acts as if you are hosting the videos, even though you are hosting them on You Tube?
I think the plug in that you linked to is for self hosting, so that would make sense.

I'd be interested in how it works out. If it does what you want, as I may have this problem for a client site pretty soon.
Keep us posted.

 

thsadmin how did the instal go? All ok?

 

I am trying out the JW Player - but I ran it through the http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets - tester - and it doesn't seem to work... the player itself is cool - but so far no good... my site had some issues, so I had to focus on them for the time being. So unfortunately the signs aren't good so far... I added the medi files, images files, all the meta data in the plug in options - but no go... I have no idea why - maybe wordpress is stripping the tags or something.

 

Strange. I will have a think over the weekend. Let me know if you make any progress though, and I'll come back to you,

have a good weekend

 

Are you uploading the videos to your own server, or are they hosted elsewhere?

 

I have tried embedding from Youtube - embeds into Jw Player and adds the meta data required - apparently, I will keep persisting with it and upload some of my own files also.

Thanks - and I will come back to this thread with my updates on progress also.

 

I remember using that JW Player plug in a while back and from what I remember, it's for self hosting your videos. I don't remember it playing well with the custom fields of You Tube videos. So I can see why it would work to do what you want it to.

Again, I have to ask, if you already have the videos uploaded to You tube and You Tube already does what you want, why are you trying to recreate that on WordPress?

Seems to me if you just wanted to make a post that included the video specs, you would just use the title of the video for the title of the post and use the spec information (if it's so important to have it some up on the SERP's) in the excerpt. Problem solved.

 

Here's a sample of rich snippets in Google search, these are videos on other sites - using the rich snippets meta to inform Google of a video within their site... the top one is also a rich snippet - but that one has the author photo and ratings - also rich snippets.



One thing that I do see - is the author name is relevant on each... I ignored that aspect... mmmm...