Video SEO with Wistia

Video SEO is the act of proactively submitting your content, through what’s called a “Video Sitemap”, so that it’s easier for Google and other search engines to find it.

Once your video sitemap is submitted your videos can:

• Appear inline in universal search results
• Send people directly to your website when clicked on in search results
• Boost overall placement for your page
• Appear in video specific search results, like http://video.google.com

Our Video SEO expert, Ben, got up-close with the camera to talk about how Video SEO can create benefits for your business:

The typical Video SEO workflow is: create the sitemap, add it to the 'root' folder of your website, submit to Google through Webmaster Tools, and check periodically to make sure it is still operating properly. Each time you add a new video, you'd need to re-create the sitemap and re-submit to Google. Yuck.

With Wistia, the work is reduced to what you do best: create great content. Wistia helps you create, host, and submit your video sitemap.

Video SEO with Wistia does require a little setup. The first thing you need to do is authorize Wistia to host your video sitemap and reference pages on your site. This is done through the robots.txt file on your web server.

A robots.txt is a file (almost) every website has that helps search engines know what content they can and cannot index. The robots.txt also has the ability to inform and authorize sitemaps for your website. To see your robots.txt file, open your browser and head to yourdomainname.com/robots.txt (substituting your domain name in). To update your robots.txt file, you either need instructions for your specific CMS, or perhaps ask your web support team.

To get started, choose “Video SEO” under the Account tab from any page in your Wistia account.

You will see the following instructions. Once you have added the line to your robots.txt and typed the URL, click the “Verify your robots.txt” button. This will retrieve your specified robots.txt and verify that the information is viewable by Google.

Once you have completed the above steps, you are all set up and now have the ability to add entries to your video sitemap from Wistia.

Once you have made and verified the entry in your robots.txt file, you will be able to add entries to your video sitemap. Once a video sitemap entry is made, it will be automatically picked up by Google and your content will be indexed according to Google's indexing queue.

The process to make a new video sitemap entry is easy. After you have embedded a video on your website (note: Video SEO will only work with SEO embeds), go to the page in Wistia where you can view the video (e.g. <youraccount>.wistia.com/medias/12345 ). Hover over the Media Actions menu and select “Add to SEO sitemap”. In order to have the SEO embed type available for your embeds, you need to have a Video SEO sitemap created and verified.

This will then bring up a dialog box where you can enter the relevant information about your video. Simply enter the required information and click “Add to video sitemap”. Your sitemap will then be automatically updated and we will inform Google that there are new changes that should be indexed.

Once you have made one or more video sitemap entries, you can easily manage the videos from your video SEO dashboard within Wistia. Simply hover over the Account tab on any Wistia page and choose the “Video SEO” option.

This will take you to the video SEO dashboard where you can:

• See all videos currently in your sitemap
• Edit the sitemap entries by clicking the “Edit” button on any entry
• Remove any entries that may no longer be valid using the “Remove” button

In the end, the goal is to get your content to rank higher in search engines like Google. Telling search engines about your content through Wistia's Video SEO feature allows your pages to:

• Rank higher in basic search results based on the presence and relevance of your video content
• When someone clicks on your video in a search engine results page, they will be taken directly to your website
• Show up as a featured video in search engine results pages
  

• Display in video specific search results

Adding more than one domain to your Video SEO in Wistia is easy to do. After adding your first domain, a button will appear on the right bar in your Video SEO account section for adding additional domains (see the image at right). You will be prompted to walk through the same steps as adding your initial domain.