Introduction #
VideoObject schema is a type of structured data markup used to provide search engines like Google with detailed information about videos, such as their title, description, duration, thumbnail, and embed URL. By implementing videoObject schema on their web pages, content creators, marketers, and video platforms can improve the visibility and relevance of their video-related content in search results, as well as provide users with more comprehensive and accurate information about their videos. VideoObject schema can also enable search engines to display video-related information in more engaging and informative ways, such as in the Google Video carousel or rich snippets.
Usage #
In most cases where there is a video property on a schema form, there are two ways to add information about videos. You can either select dynamic and let Actus Deep Schema parse information from videos that exist in the content of the webpage or select edit and manually input your desired information.
However in some cases, like in the How-To schema, you may need information about the chapters a video might have. In this case you should go to the “Items” section and create a Video Schema.
When you add a new Video schema form, you can either input all information manually, or get dynamic information from your page content or youtube. At the top of the form there is an option named “Get video from…“. Clicking on the page content button, allows you to search for a page and select a video from it’s content. If you click on the YouTube button, allows you to get information from a YouTube video. An input box appears where you should enter the ID of the YouTube video (the string that comes after /watch?v= in the URL). Most fields of the form will be populated automatically using information from YouTube. If the video has chapter information, this will populate the chapters section accordingly. In order to get information for the duration and uploaded properties, you need to go to the Settings and enter a YouTube API key. More information about how to get a YouTube API key, here.
Video Indexing #
If Google detects videos on your site, you can see the Video indexing report in Search Console. The report shows the status of video indexing on your site. Please note that this report is different from the Video Rich results report. It is about video indexing, regardless of any video structured data, and therefore it does not show the validity of Video structured data items. The Video Rich results report is unchanged and continues to show which Video structured data items are valid or invalid on your site.
Although structured data for all videos on a page are important, you get rich results only if the video is the main content of the page. As Google says:
To give your videos maximum exposure, create a dedicated page for each video, where the video is the most prominent subject on the page. Some features require that type of video page, including Key Moments, the Live Badge, and other rich result formats. It’s fine to include the same video on both a dedicated page and its original page alongside other information, like a news article or a product detail page.
Properties #
video #
Here you can specify the main information about the video. You can set the title and the url of the actual video, the duration and format, the date it was uploaded and a thumbnail.
info #
In this section you can enter a description for the video and the views it has.
chapters #
In this section you enter information about the chapters of the video. For every chapter you need to enter a title, a url that points to the start time of the chapter and the start and end time of the chapter in seconds.
extra #
Extra information about the video such as the authors, publishers, languages and rating.
