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What is the best way to include video transcripts on your pages?
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I just posted a question as a comment on this blog post (http://www.audiotranscription.org/6-reasons-you-need-to-have-your-sites-videos-transcribed/comment-page-1/#comment-4311) and realized I probably should have asked the question here because it is really SEO-related.
We are in the process of transcribing all of our videos. Can you someone recommend how best to post the transcript file on our product pages? For example, here's a product page that has a video review on it: http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/product/behringer-x32-digital-mixing-system. Would it be best to post a link to the transcript file or insert the iframe transcript file from DotSub.com (in that case wouldn't DotSub.com be getting credit for our original content?) or, should we just let our captions on the YouTube stream from there (which is what's happening right now)? Will Google still crawl the transcript if the only place it's available is on YouTube? If so, doesn't YouTube get credited for that content, and not our site? Even if we do post a trascript on the page, if it appeared at YouTube first, wouldn't YouTube get credit for the original version?
We want credit for that content...just not sure how to get it?
I understand that moving to Wistia.com would probably solve most of these issues. What I'm trying to figure out is how best to handle new transcripts for existing videos over at YouTube?
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Trying to get to a good solution for what I was wanting has inspired me to write a complete blog post on everything we are working to accomplish with our Video SEO. After search high and low, I did find exactly what I was looking for. It is a tool called "CaptionBox." There is a WordPress plug-in available. Information on the page explains that it's a legacy product, but we are going to install it anyway. For more information on SpeakerText's answer to my question as to whether or not we could still use their product despite not being an Enterprise customer, stay tuned for a blog post within the next 3-4 days.
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I don't think you would get credit for your content if it was within an iframe and hosted on a different site like DotSub or YouTube. If you Google "HTML scroll box" you can find some good tutorials on adding an HTML scroll box. This should make it easy for Google to crawl and index the text content as part of your page but not take up too much space for human visitors.
If you also post the transcript on YouTube then I think this would be considered duplicate content by search engines. After the Panda update I would be cautious about having tons of duplicate content on your site.
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Thanks Donnie. I watched an read both of these, which were quite good, but still, neither one addressed where is best to post the video transcript. I noticed that SEOMoz actually puts the entire video transcript right on their page. However, for us, posting an entire transcript on a product page just isn't probably the best idea, particuarly for long videos.
I did surmise that using the <iframe>transcript that DotSub.com provides is fairly useless because Google won't crawl the iframe, consequently not crawling the transcript.</p> <p>Ideally, it would be great to include an interactive transcript on the page via a scrolling text box so it doesn't dominate the entire product page. Has anyone done or tried this?</p> <p>*Update - As I was poking around and reading Donnie's recommendations, which were excellent I also found Sean Lind's tool that will automatically build YouTube embed code that contains a link back to your site (instead of YouTube). It was so cool I thought I'd better include it here: <a href="http://www.seanlind.com/poker-blog/geek/youtube-video-backlink-embedding-tool/">http://www.seanlind.com/poker-blog/geek/youtube-video-backlink-embedding-tool/</a></p> <p>I still haven't got any specific recommendations on where is the best place to post a trascript on a product page....all suggestions welcome!</p></iframe>
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Oh yes and this SEOmoz article really breaks it down: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/building-links-with-video-content
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There was a WBF on transcripts for videos a while back: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/video-seo-basics-whiteboard-friday-11080
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