You used to be able to get videos in Google’s search results just for having it on your webpage, anywhere. Google is always trying to improve their results and getting video to pop up is harder than it used to be.
In my frustration I discovered some insight into this video result dilemma. This is a quote from a Joost De Valk, a well known SEO guy who makes some great WordPress SEO plugins. He also does a lot with video rich snippets. This explains perfectly why I haven’t been able to get video rich snippets on the home page of some domains I work on:
“…what all of the posts that have videos, but aren’t getting a video snippet in the search results actually have in common, is that the video is not the primary content of the page. The video is “added on” as a bonus, of sorts, instead of being the primary piece. It makes sense for Google to not want to show a video snippet when what the user gets is actually textual or image content, with the video being only a tiny portion of the page.”
–Joost De Valk
I have tested this theory on two sites and see the same results that Joost is talking about.
So, in order to get a video to show up in SERPs you have to make the video the highlight of the page, not just a link/video hidden in the content.
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