How to get video thumbnails to appear in SERPs

[nicole.healthline]

What's the best way to get video thumbs to appear in SERPs?

[SEM-Freak]

Hi,

Do some research here: http://www.reelseo.com/

[tomcraig86]

There was a post on the blog really recently about this if I recall correctly. Although some people say that through embedding a single video from YouTube onto a relevant high PA page will do the trick, the best method is to host your own videos on your website. A quick search online for HTML5 video hosting (with flash fallback) should be your answer! With doing so, you will makes up your content so that Google knows the content is of the type 'video' and will display as such.

[Intergen]

I have been able to get YouTube vid's to have a thumbnail appear in the SERP's on the first page for extremely high competitive search terms.  Obviously this drives traffic.

The methods I used were:

Keyword in Title - in a natural (non-stuffed) manner

Keyword and link to the site in the Description

Keyword in the tags

Strong video views and embeds on other sites - I don't think I have it embedded anywhere on a high PR site.

Here is the video and keyword it ranks for so you can see what I did - Google search phrase - best lsat prep. The video thumbnail is in the 7th spot & receives several hundred views per month. Also #3 for the search term best lsat preparation on Google

[firstconversion]

I recommend a read of Phil's post http://www.distilled.net/blog/video/getting-video-results-in-google/

[gracessweetlife]

You may want to look at using the proper markup, here is a link to schema.org - http://schema.org/VideoObject