If you do this, Google will (eventually) index the contents of your blog post, based on the text in the post, and the file-names of the file(s)you've used.
But the spiders behind search haven't quite got the hang of speech and image recognition yet: as with images, you need to explicity tell them about your content.
Webmaster Central have announced a new way of doing this called schema-markup.org. This asks people who provide videos to show them in their websites using code like this:
<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/VideoObject"> <h2>Video: <span itemprop="name">Title</span></h2> <meta itemprop="duration" content="T1M33S" /> <meta itemprop="thumbnailURL" content="thumbnail.jpg" /> <meta itemprop="embedURL" content="http://www.example.com/videoplayer.swf?video=123" /> <object ...> <embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" ...> </object> <span itemprop="description">Video description</span></div>
Sidebar
The code originally given in Google's post was missing the / at the start of the closing </div> statement. I suspect they'll fix it soon - but it's why you may get a message like
"your HTML cannot be accepted: Tag is not closed: DIV"
Fix it by simply changing the second <div> to </div>.
Unfortunately the suggested won't work for Blogger users, because the Post-editor doesn't let us use meta-tags. You can put the code into your post if you want, but they will be stripped out when the post is published or viewed in Compose mode.
But there are some options you can use to tell search engines about your video conent:
1) Edit your template, add a conditional statement that is only applied to the post that contains the video, and put the schema.org code (without the H2 and Object statement, of course) into the <head> section. Something like this:
<b:if cond='data:blog.url == "http://url of your post"'>Disclaimer: I haven't tried ths myself. But it strikes me that it should work, give the way we deal with other meta-tags when necessary. However "should" is an "interesting" word. Maybe it won't work, if the tags are not in the same <div> as the video.
PUT THE SCHEMA.ORG META-TAG STATEMENTS IN HERE
</b:if>
2) Put the description of the video into the blog-post - just work it into the text naturally.
3) Use a title statement to give the video some hover text LINK (I guess this works for videos - haven't tried it) or alt-text.
For both of the last two, remember that indexing of text on your blog will link to your blog-post, not to the video, so it may not get the "videos are cool" factor that seems to influence search results. But they are both easy things to do.
4) Load your video to Youtube (or Vimeo or wherever), and put the content description into the fields there, along with links to your blog, of course.
This will have the vids-are-cool effect, but the search traffic will go to the host site, and may not ever get to your blog - to get any search-traffic benefit, you need to to have good links to your blog in their the video-site information, or good promotion of it in the video itself.
5) Or maybe the Video Sitemaps or mRSS feeds approach that Google's article LINK also mentioned work well-enough for Blogger-users. (Sorry, I have no time to investigate either of these - am keen to get comments from anyone knows more about them though.)
