Media API: SEO Best Practices

Optimizing your pages for search engines gets a lot easier with the Media API, because you can bring your video metadata deeper into your site where search engines can find it. The key is to use the Media API on your application server to dynamically generate pages that have the metadata in them by the time they reach the browser.

Get back in the HTML box

Flash is great on web sites, but web search engines don't index content in Flash movies. Nor do they index content that's retrieved by scripts on the page. All they index is what's on the page – in pure HTML – when the page is loaded. Search engine crawlers index that text, then they leave. If your metadata isn't on the page, it won't be indexed by the search engine. (Note: video search engines are different – they don't crawl pages to get their content).

The Media API helps address this by allowing you to query metadata from your Video Cloud account at the application server, when a browser makes a request for a page. Before the page is returned, your application server calls to Video Cloud, gets the content and renders it. When the page is returned to the browser (or crawler), it will contain the precious metadata the search engines seek.

You can also call the Media API on the client for AJAX-style interactions – and we have samples on how to do that. Be aware that this isn't SEO-friendly. Again, the search engine crawlers don't click buttons, don't run scripts, and don't run Flash movies. You can think of them as browsers from the mid-90's with images turned off. That's about the level of page content they look at. Any use of the Media API on the client is not going to move the SEO needle.

Just about any application server that supports server-side scripting languages will be able to call the Media API. Video Cloud-savvy developers have created SDKs (Software Development Kits) for most popular web-oriented languages that you can include in your applications as native classes for easy API access. Check out Video Cloud SDKs to see an up-to-date list of available Media API SDKs. You should also check out Open Source @ Brightcove, a community supported initiative to host a variety of applications, SDKs and tools for the Video Cloud platform in one central location.

Of course, you can directly access the wire protocol to retrieve API results. See the Getting Started topic for more, or peruse the other Media API documentation.