Hướng dẫn Rich Video Snippets cho Drupal sites

This guide shows you how to easily enable rich video snippets for your Drupal site using Wistia.

Why Rich Video Snippets?

Rich video snippets can make the search engine results more appealing for your website pages that contain video. This increases the chance of potential visitors clicking through from the search engine to your or your clients’ website. More visitors in general means more revenue, so enabling the ability for rich video snippets on a website could potentially result in more revenue for its owner. 

What are Rich Video Snippets?

Regular Search Engine Result:

Search Engine Result with Rich Video Snippet:

How to enable Rich Video Snippets in Drupal

There are several ways to enable rich video snippets on a website. In this tutorial I’ll show you a way that only requires two basic steps. As a small company we don’t have the resources to do the video hosting ourselves so we’re using a third party video hosting provider to host our videos. In our case Wistia provides us with the tools we need to easily enable the ablility for video snippets to apear for our Drupal sites. On the Drupal side all we need to do is add a line of text to your robots.txt file and add a bit of embed code to the page. It’s really easy. Wistia provides you with both. You can learn about where to get that information from the Wistia site in the video below. You’ll need a Wistia account to apply this method, so register one for free if you haven’t got one yet. 

Step by step Drupal implementation

Step 1 - enable the Robotstxt module.

Go to the module’s configuration page at example.com/admin/config/search/robotstxt and add the line of text you got from Wistia in there. Now go back to the Wistia site and verify this domain.

Make sure to double check if search engines have access to your robots.txt file, as this is key to having the rich video snippets show up in the search engines. Also make sure to empty the cache if you’re using caching mechanisms like Varnish.

Step 2 - Add the SEO embed code

We’ll add the SEO embed code to the site so your video is shown to the user and the search engine bots can read the snippet. The easiest way is to paste the embed code in the node’s body field. You could create a separate field for the embed code if you like. Whatever you choose to do - make sure your text format is set to Full HTML. 

Enjoy your work*

That’s it, you’re done. The possibility for pretty search engine video result snippets to apear in search engines is now activated. Remember that search engines decide on a query to query basis if the rich snippet is shown. Enabling the technical ability on your site is one thing, having them appear for every query is a different game.

Test your work*

You can test if the rich snippet information is correctly provided by using tools like Bings markup validator or Googles structured data testing tool. It could take a while before the rich video snippet information shows up as it takes a while for a search engine to read your updated robots.txt file.

* = optional but recommended steps

the Wistia side of things

Have a look at the video below to watch a video tutorial about the Wistia side of things.

Is there a module for that?

Not yet, but Media Wistia module could use your help to integrate more of Wistia’s API with Drupal.

Video SEO Resources

In the section below you can find links to several tools and important resources regarding rich video snippets.

More from you?

If you happen to know more great resources about Drupal and Video SEO or happen to be knowledgable in this area yourself? - please share below. Thanks in advance!