AjiNIMC, I'm currently brewing over the same thing. With half a year's delay I recently noticed those news (better: olds;) on google's cooperation with adobe from June this year, and to my opinion this did not receive the attention it deserves. I have put considerable effort in getting my first video indexed right before christmas. My page is spot #1-#3 anyways for the major keywords, but there are three adwords adds (one from me;) and sometimes a google-base/froogle-block above. So what I am primiarily targetting, is this screenshot-eyecatcher.
I'd love to see tedster's initial attempt on this issue under
[webmasterworld.com...]
get warmed up again.
As a start, let me tell one of my findings: Under
[google.com...]
you may find a more detailed description of the valid XML-tags for video sitemaps. I submitted my fist version just defining url, title and description, and the sitemap got accepted, but nothing happened. Two days later I defined the <tag>-tags (the equivalent to meta-data-keywords, I assume) additionally, and now my video is found in the google video-search for the keywords defined there.
But I still have tons of questions, because the final goal is clearly to get listed in the regular SERPS (universal search) with the screenshot of my videos. So what can I do about this?
> Thats a good idea to edit the meta-data of the video but I wonder how easily a user can do that
Yes. I assume, google is counter-checking this with the regular semantic parts of the ranking algorithm. But what I completely did not understand, was the intention of the <video:rating> and <video:view_count> tags: Shall I rate my video myself? Shall I tell google how often my visitors viewed it? I cannot believe this and would really like to hear something from google officials on this.
Another block of questions has to do with what is really indexable in flash-files? A rose is a rose is a rose, but this is different for flash. For instance, someone said, it would help to have some text on the first and last frames of the video file. OK: but how can you be sure, this text isn't "re-imaged" so to speak in the process of further manipulating the video file. I suspect, to add text with windows movie maker and then generate the flv-file with mmjpeg is compeltely useleess?
Is adobes software the only stuff that guarantees such text is kept indexable? You can open a pdf-document with a normal editor and at least see some fragements of your text embedded, but the syntax of swf-files is so cryptic, that makes no sense. And I assume an flv-file is a pure video stream with absolutely no text embedded? Or am I wrong here?
And what about javascript? Google-video-search has indexed my video and it may be found, but it cannot be played on the video-search-page (which I don't find that bad actually), only on my page. I guess this has to do with the swf-player I use. OMG I'm such a noob on flash (as most SEOs), but I am pretty sure it is a must to learn at least the basics here.
