Who can deny making web video is not a child’s play? Time was when web video was a technology in the making, and anything you shoot with your video camera made waves. People looked at your videos with awe, wishing secretly that they could do better than you if only they knew how to go about.
Things have now changed, and changed for better. Making web video is no big deal though combining different types of videos into one is still some way off for most.
The onus is decisively shifting to making videos that really help the viewers. No amount of snazzy doings or lengthy talks can sustain the average viewers’ interest for long if the web videos do not solve their problems.
That calls for putting some quality in the videos in terms of both 1) something to gain, and 2) pleasing to watch. But these alone will not suffice to making your videos popular.
You have to go to the town, climb every rooftop, visit every roadside pub, shouting all the time about the good points of your videos. Fortunately, you need to do none of these, and instead do a few things with the clicks of the mouse, without incurring any expense other than a little of your time.
In this part-1 of the 2-part series we will be looking at how to create a video feed and submit it to Google so that your videos show up in its search results.
MRSS, The Solution
MRSS stands for Media RSS, which is an RSS feed of media files like images, videos, and audios. See how MRSS differs from the usual RSS.
In the present instance, an MRSS will contain a list of your web videos that can be submitted to Google as a video sitemap for indexing.
The concept of MRSS is not new. It was first designed by Yahoo in January, 2004 along with the Media RSS community. There have been several enhancements to it since then. And today an MRSS indeed comes in many hues.
Yahoo's MRSS Module
There is a WordPress plugin called MediaRSS that is equipped to locate ‘img’ tags in your posts and generate XML code that can be used by feed readers.
Unfortunately, the plugin cannot locate video files in the posts. This means there is perhaps no way to create an MRSS than to hand-code it yourself. The good news is it is easy to do.
Optimizing MRSS
Sure you have this question in mind: How will Google know what my video is about?
Search engines are reportedly working on speech-to-text technology that can allow them to understand the subject of a video for delivering better search results. But it’s still some time before this happens as a rule than an exception.
Then again, should that happen sooner or later it’s not clear how the videos that don’t have voice narrations will figure in the search results.
So we come back to the traditional way of optimizing an MRSS by easily including title, description, keywords, and thumbnail image among others for each video.
As you may have already guessed, keywords inserted in the title and description work as signals for the search engines to identify them with the concerned video.
Coding The MRSS
Since MRSS is just an extension of RSS, the code should appear familiar. Take another look at the Yahoo MRSS module, and try to follow how the changes have been incorporated over the past years.
The MRSS code for 2WebVideo video tutorials is given below in brief. The code between <item> and </item> represents each video (given in large red colored font), and repeats as more videos are added in the list.
Hope it will not be difficult to understand, and do it for your own web videos. Feel free to copy the code and make changes as needed. The file is to be saved as a ‘something.xml‘ file, and then uploaded to your server space.
In the second part of this article we will see how to submit an MRSS feed to Google, and how to embed the feed into your webpage.
<rss version="2.0" xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/">
<channel>
<title>2WebVideo Video Tutorials For Web Professionals</title>
<link>http://www.2webvideo.com/video-production/mrss/</link>
<description>The 2WebVideo Video Tutorials Archive</description>
<item>
<title>2WebVideo Tuts: How To Create An Overlay Lightbox In Your Webpage</title>
<link>http://www.2webvideo.com/video-production/creating-overlay-lightbox</link>
<description>Free HTML To Create Overlay Lightbox For Any Webpage</description>
<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.2webvideo.com/video-production/creating-overlay-lightbox</guid>
<media:content url="http://www.2webvideo.com/video-production/videos/overlay-lightbox.mp4" type="video/x-msvideo" height="480" width="640" medium="video" isDefault="true">
<media:title>2WebVideo: Create Overlay Lightbox With Free HTML</media:title>
<media:description>2WebVideo Tuts: Create Overlay Lightbox, Free HTML</media:description>
<media:thumbnail url="http://www.2webvideo.com/video-production/images/overlay-lightbox.jpg" height="120" width="160"/>
</media:content>
</item>
</channel>
</rss> This article of January 30th, 2010 is authored by Partha Bhattacharya, who runs this website. Catering to the clients' video needs aside, Partha also writes guest articles for other web publications. |
