5 on-page SEO improvements for tube sites

5 on-page SEO improvements for tube sites

Since Google is the most important source of organic traffic for most sites, we will embed Google videos here and place links to more in-depth pages to other sources, in which Google is mentioned a lot as well.

1. Use schema.org markup for videos

It is strongly recommended to use schema.org markup for videos to help the search engines (SE) to better understand what a video is about. Because the SE’s can better index a page with video it will also show a more relevant description in the search snippet in the search results.

Watch the video below where the benefits of using video markup are explained.

Surprisingly, many of the bigger tube sites aren’t using this yet, so there’s an opportunity for the smaller sites to make a little difference. Take that chance!

Read more on Google: markup for video.

2. Create a video sitemap

A second, also recommended method to help search engines is the use of a sitemap. The sitemap is a file where all web pages of the site are listed and shows how the site is organized.

Google has created an extension to the sitemap protocol to add additional information about video content. Since tube sites have thousands of videos, adding a video sitemap will help Google to discover new content quicker, so it can be indexed faster as well!

Read more on Google: Video sitemap

3. Allow search engines to crawl your CSS and JavaScript files

Contrary to what many people think, Google can interpret JavaScript quite well these days. This allows them to better understand your web pages.

Since webmasters often use specific folders for JavaScript and CSS files or put those files on a CDN, it’s very tempting to block search engines from crawling them.

Since Google and other search engines want to see the same page as the user does, it’s recommended to allow search engines to crawl JavaScript and CSS files.

Make sure JavaScript doesn’t call any content that you don’t want indexed. Use robots.txt files to block those pages and documents from being indexed. Also, if you use CSS code to hide certain content, be aware that search engines will be able to see that as well. If you do that to ‘trick’ the search bot, make sure you have another good look at this.

In case you’re not sure if Google has access to your CSS and JavaScript files, you can use the functionality "Fetch as Google" in Google Webmaster Tools. It gives you a view of how Google sees your site and it also gives a list of resources it couldn’t get.

4. Add thumbnail images of the videos

If you have the chance to create thumbnails of the videos you publish on the tube site, it will be a great asset for both the user and for your SEO. Simply said: the more content you have, the more there is to index by search engines.

Here is an example of a site that has nicely created thumbnails for every page: http://Youporn.com (see the thumbnail tab for a video), but when it comes to SEO, it is not the best example though.

To have the images indexed (and therefore get more links to your videos), make sure the images can be crawled and indexed. Also, give each image a proper ALT text to provide Google with information about the images. If this needs to be automatically generated, at least use the video title in the ALT text, combined with a number for example. Be creative here!

Ideally, the file names of the images are also relevant to the image content, but understandably this is difficult.

5. Use a breadcrumb path

As mentioned before, Schema.org provides structured markup for HTML that can be used by search engines to better crawl, index and understand a web page.

The breadcrumb structured markup helps search engines to understand more of the relation between pages and the hierarchy of your website. Breadcrumbs also help the visitor to see where they are and they can easily go back up one level in the hierarchy. For example, go back from a video page to the category page.

Therefore, it’s recommended to use breadcrumb rich snippets to create a few extra deep links to your website in the search result snippets.

In the search snippet show in the image above there are three links to different pages in the breadcrumb:

• Home
• Gay Cam
• Young & Teenager

Remarkably, there aren’t many tube sites with any form of breadcrumbs, let alone rich snippets. So there’s an easy way to add a few extra links in your search results snippets and make a little difference compared to your competitors!

Updated: March 06, 2015