A while ago one of our friends, Joost de Valk, famous for his WordPress SEO plugin reached out to us with regards to trying out the beta version of his plugin. This new plugin of his was an extension for his SEO plugin focusing mainly on Videos. We love to try out new things to see how it can benefit our business. Well, this one worked magic. We tried the Yoast Video SEO extension on our List25 site and quickly we found ourselves ranking high for some crazy keywords. It was because of our Video SEO. In this article, we will show you how to do video SEO in WordPress with Yoast Video SEO plugin.
Before we go any further, we should clarify that while WordPress SEO by Yoast is a free plugin, this Video SEO module costs $69. We were among the handful few beta testers of this plugin.
What does Video SEO module do?
It automatically creates a video sitemap on your site which indexes every post that has an embedded video. It adds MediaRSS enhancements to your RSS feed. It shows you the snippet with an actual video. It adds Facebook OpenGraph tags on your video pages. Oh, and it supports all popular video platforms (i.e Youtube, Vimeo, Blip, Dailymotion etc).
If you are a video blogger, or a blogger that likes to embed videos in their posts, then this is a MUST have plugin for you. In our months of testing this plugin, we saw our articles ranking higher and getting a higher click through rate. This is because video results are easier to rank for. There is not much competition because other webmasters have not jumped on this. Well, this is your opportunity to maximize the benefits for yourself.
How to take advantage of Yoast Video SEO plugin?
First thing you need to do is purchase the Video SEO plugin. Yes, it does cost $69, but it is well worth the investment.
Note: You MUST have WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin installed for this module to work.
Once you have purchased the video SEO plugin, simply install and activate that plugin. Upon activation, you will see a new menu item shown under the SEO menu called Video SEO.
Once you have entered the license key, you will see a new option on this page to include video sitemap.
Your screen may have more custom post types if you have more post types. Select the ones you want to index and hit save settings. Then make sure you press the Re-Index Videos button.
This plugin will then go through all of your selected post types (posts, pages etc) and find the embedded videos. Those videos will then be index in your sitemap.
Now when you edit your posts, you will see a snippet preview like this:
Next thing you know, you will start ranking higher in google search with your videos.
i use normal yoast , i wanna use
this one also WP Video SEO, do they work at the same time ?
Please contact the plugin author to see if their plugin works along with Yoast SEO
Hi there, thank you very much for this., however I have a problem with this plugin. For some reason, when I open the sitemap to view it, it is showing that videos are in categories they are not!
Did you report it to Yoast?
Thanks for the post… video SEO is definitely the wave of the future. I’ve uploaded the plugin on a few sites and am waiting for the rich snippets to show up. Do you know how long it took for the big G to show the new snippets in search results? It’s been almost a week and my site was re-indexed, yet no new rich snippet data.
The way rich snippets work is different for each site and each user. For ex. it might be showing rich snippets to some user already.
As soon as I read this post, I went and got the plugin and worked it. Everything works great … I took Yoast’s advice to use Vimeo instead of YouTube. Probably a smart move. However, I want to be able to control the viewing dimensions on the page. When I try to use the short code that WordPress recommends which is something like this …
[vimeo 578493849 w=600&h=280]
or
[vimeo vimo.com/578493849 w=600&h=280]
It doesn’t work. If I simply copy and paste the iFrame embed code from Vimeo in HTML view, it works fine.
Just wondering if someone figured out how to do the dimensions using the shortcode method? If so, can you share?
But the plugin seems to work just fine with the iFrame embed code … so, I’m good to go, but I didn’t know if the shortcode is better than using the iFrame code.
The shortcode deosn’t work by default. You have to use the shortcode plugin by Viperbond.
Just what I thought … I need another plugin. So, curious, is there any difference between the iFrame embed and the short code? Is it just two ways to do the same thing or is there something drastically different?
If you use the visual editor, then some users have reported issues with the iFrame embeds being disappeared when switching from Visual to HTML.
Interested in the plugin, but have a couple of questions:
– What are the terms of the license – single installation, multiple on blogs I personally own, or multiple on blogs I own and on client sites
– How does it behave on a multi-site installation?
Thanks
Quote from Yoast’s FAQ page:
Yes, you can use it on all sites you maintain. We will only accept support requests from the email associated with the license key, so if you’re using it for clients that manage their own site, it’s probably better to buy a license for them. If you have multiple sites though, by all means use it!
Great idea, as always from Joost. It’s so easy to install that I’ve messed up! Everything looks fine, the re-index process trawled through my 781 posts and despite finding plenty of embedded () videos from YouTube, and adding one fresh one, when I look at my video sitemap, it’s blank, empty, nada, nothing to see. Anyone any ideas what I’ve done wrong?!
No clue what went wrong. We have it running on our sites, and it is working fine. Maybe hit up Yoast to see what’s going on.
I had the same issue at first. It turned out that the I-framing method did not work intheearly version. I ended up just placing the URL of the video on a separate line in the blog post and that worked. In my casei used Vimeo videos
I understand that Joost has upgraded the plugin to allow for I-frame embedding to work now so perhaps it’s already fixed for you?
In the end, hat off to Joost for fast email response plus also adding videoObjectschema with his latest update to the plugin
Bo
Joost has been great, quick response and personal to this issue. It turns out that there is a small bug in v 1.2 that means the sitemap doesn’t display due to a small coding issue related to the stylesheet. The code works and if you view-source, it’s there.
I’ve just tested a Beta of v 1.2.1 and it works fine.
Nice writeup guys. Can you tell us…is there an option for turning off the included OpenGraph code? We’ve had some issues with more than one plugin including OpenGraph. We know this because we’ve included the option in our plugin to solve some customer issues.
Thanks for the clarification if you can.
Not sure how that question is relevant to this post. Anyways, if you go to Yoast SEO social section, there is a checkbox to turn off facebook opengraph data.
Syed, this is a fantastic plugin and I am getting it today. In the Yoast sitemap builder it builds one main sitemap with sub site maps inside of it like here http://www.videobroadcastservices.com/sitemap_index.xml.
When I submit the sitemap to Google Webmaster tools should I just submit the main sitemap or submit the sub sitemaps?
Submit the sub sitemaps.
Love Yoast’s products. Thanks for sharing about this great new one. Do you know if there is a developer license. Would like to add this to many of my client sites
Theresa
This plugin is GPL, so you purchase it once and use it in whichever way you like.