As promised in my post yesterday, today marks the day for a new release of my Video SEO plugin. This one brings support for yet another few plugins and some more: two new video hosting platforms: Wistia and Vippy.

Wistia support: embedding and SEO

The support for Wistia that is added in this release was on the list from day one of this plugins release. It was one of the most highly requested video platforms to be supported, but there was an issue: there’s no official Wistia plugin other than a small thing that preserves the embed code from being mangled, even though Wistia itself does support oEmbed.

So I decided to go the extra mile and add oEmbed support for Wistia through the plugin, which, in itself is fairly easy. But then I found out that oEmbed in WordPress really has no way to filter the URL you’re sending to the video provider, and I needed to add variables to get the SEO version of the embed code. A lot of thinking later, I decided, heck, let’s try it with the normal embed code. And it worked, miraculously, Google found it and properly showed it as a video.

WordPress 3.5 adds a filter for the oEmbed URL, which means that when you use a URL in the editor, I can add parameters to that to further optimize, so we’ll do that further down the line. For now, this update makes it easy to embed Wistia videos, just drop the URL to the video on one line and it should embed the video properly, recognize it in Video SEO and do all the optimization for you. Gotta love simplicity.

Vippy support

Another video platform that had been requested literally on day one of the plugin being released was Vippy, requested by my SEOktoberfest buddy Geir. His colleague from Metronet, well known WordPress developer Ronald Huereca, patched the plugin to automatically support Vippy when the Vippy WordPress plugin is being used.

Supported plugins & themes

This release adds support for two video embedding plugins, FlowPlayer and WP Video Lightbox. Which means we now support 12 video plugins. We now also support the embed codes for YouTube and Vimeo videos from the popular Weaver theme, even though I think it’s unwise to use those, because when you switch themes, your videos will no longer play.

What else do you want?

If you’re a user of the plugin: what else would you like to see? If you’re not a user yet but you do do video, what’s holding you back? Please let me know in the comments! Also, if you don’t have the plugin yet, buy it here.

Video SEO for Wistia & Vippy is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites. A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!