How to Use Video Structured Data from Schema.org?

Max Rosen

The latest buzzword that took the Web by storm is Structured Data. Everybody knows of it but not everybody knows how to use it—and why exactly? Structured data is a group of markup tags that webmasters can use to embed into their website, so search engines can easily add rich snippets to their search result pages that give users a preview of what information is contained on the websites listed on the page.

Structured data is a type of metadata—data about data—and the groups of those HTML tags are collected and defined in schemas. Schema.org is an initiative by the World’s top search engines Bing, Yahoo! and Google to provide collections of schemas for use on websites. The end goal of such collections is promotion of standards on the Internet, which bring us closer to Semantic Web, a framework that aims for data to be easily transferable between different programs, systems and websites/browsers.

Schema.org is a collection of different schemas that allow user to quickly create rich snippets for display on search engines. This includes a schema for a video file. You can find the definition of a VideoObject at Schema.org.

*This class contains derivatives of IPTC rNews properties. rNews is a data model of publishing metadata with serializations currently available for RDFa as well as HTML5 Microdata. More information about the IPTC and rNews can be found at rnews.org.

To install structured data for a video on your website, you can use the tags from the table above and insert them into the HTML of your website. You can also use Data Highlighter—available through a Google Webmaster Tools—account for your website, or simply install a plugin or a module that allow you to tag your page without knowing how to tag.

How to Add Schema.org Video Structured Data to your Website

How to use video structured data from schema.org? First, we have to add the structured data to your website – here are the main steps:

Choosing the right type of schema: Select the right type of schema that best represents your business and/or your website.
Update your website: Add the schema markup to your video page.
Test your schema markup: For any structured data to work it has to be implemented correctly. After installing the structured data snippet on your website, you need to make sure that your schema markup validates. If you want Google to display rich results from your website, you need to test your schema using Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool.
Monitoring and analysis of your results: After you have correctly implemented the right schema on all your video pages, you should continually check the performance of your video(s). Another free service comes in useful for tracking your video data – Search Console (long time ago called Google Webmaster Tools).

Remember, when you add structured data to your website, in most cases the rich snippets for your website won’t display in the search engines for at least a couple of weeks, so instead of waiting to see if it worked, head on over to the Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool!

You may also want to browse through Google’s manual on Rich Snippets and Structured Data. Good luck!