Plugin Review: Video SEO for WordPress SEO

There seems to be a lot of interest lately in rich media snippets, otherwise known as microdata or microformats.

The plugin under review today makes use of this type of data to give us better results in our SEO marketing efforts.

You have probably already heard about WordPress SEO, and hopefully you are using it too. Why? It’s pretty much the leading SEO plugin for WordPress, one of those plugins you just have to install on every WordPress site you create.

But today we’re here to talk about an add-on plugin to WordPress SEO, called Video SEO.

This is the first premium plugin add-on that Joost de Valk (Yoast) has created, and is available from his website at $89.

The core idea of the Video SEO plugin is to improve your results in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). Many people spend so much time and money on improving their site’s SEO, but then forget that it’s also about attracting the human eye in search engine results.

Consider the following screenshot of a search in Google:

And then another one where we have a site (WP Mayor) which has Video SEO installed:

What can we tell when looking at the two?

I think you will agree with me that the listing having a video included in it is the one that attracts the most attention.

Incidentally, the other listings which attract attention are those which have the author displayed, and this is also due to them included microformats. The listing from the WordPress.org plugin repository, which has star ratings, is also a winner, and again it is enhanced with the use of rich snippets.

So we’re seeing a trend here, with more and more people turning to microformats to better describe their posts and gain some advantage in the SERPs.

The nice thing is that you don’t have to create the videos yourself. In the post highlighted above, I just inserted a video from YouTube and it showed up in the SERPs next to my post title and description. Very easy and no effort needed from my end.

The Video SEO plugin supports:

• Automatic XML Video Sitemap generation (adding on to the WordPress SEO XML Sitemaps)
• MediaRSS enhancements to your RSS feed
• Full support for schema.org videoObject markup
• Snippet previews with the actual video still in them
• Facebook OpenGraph tags on your video pages
• Support for many major video platforms, including Youtube, Vimeo, Blip, DailyMotion and others

Here’s a video overview of the Video SEO plugin:

I’m already using it on most of my blogs, and I’ve got to say that I really love this plugin and now consider it as one of my essential plugins. It’s so easy to set up and get it going, and the results are great as my pages are now more attractive in the search engine results pages.

Considering that this plugin can be used on as many sites as you wish, it’s a very good deal and one that will instantly improve your SEO efforts. There aren’t many plugins that can make that claim and really deliver, so I’m giving this plugin a full thumbs up from my end.

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