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Video platform: a customizable, rich media solution | 36

Having a sitemap would really nail the nuts and bolts of video SEO; a properly configured sitemap would collect all the
pages of the video platform and giving it structure. This structure helped the search engines to find your pages much
quicker and even rank them higher in the search results.

4.4.3 Results

The findings made it very clear that the growth of mobile video plays a huge role. It is a big part of traffic to the video
platform. Since more and more users are using their mobile devices to surf the web, it is important for the video platform
to make use of this. Having a video platform that adapts and resizes to different screens of mobile devices would mean
that the video platform is making use of all its resources. Mobile traffic is only growing more and more [8], and a company
that wants to host its own video platform would want to make use of this.

A video platform just like any other platform was in need of good SEO. While meta data on all of the pages of the video
platform was playing a big role in getting indexed and ranked by the search engine; there was also some more SEO
techniques one could use for the video platform. Hosting the video on your own domain, gave more value to the website
[10]. In this case the search engines would give more value to the video platform, and rank it higher in the search results.
Having a higher position in the search results meant a huge increase in visitors and traffic to the website.

It was important for the video platform to have social features; Being able to share the video through Twitter or Facebook.
Nowadays almost everyone has a Facebook or Twitter account, or even both. Having social share buttons, would make
sure that the video platform is getting the most out of the social features and this would create many paths back to the
video platform. Having many links on other websites that link back to the video platform helped improve your rankings in
the search engines. In the eyes of the search engines, a website that had many links back to its pages from other websites
on the web, meant that the website was popular; and popular websites get a higher ranking.

Finally a well-structured sitemap was needed. The sitemap was publically available, and search engines would go through
it from time to time, in order to find out if new pages had been added. The new pages would then be indexed in the search
engines. That meant that every entry in the video sitemap had to include a link back to the landing page of the video. It’s a
tedious job, to manually add new pages to the sitemap. With the video platform there is no need for manual work. Every
time a video is uploaded, a link to the video page is generated and added to the sitemap.

4.4.4 Problems

I didn’t encounter many problems finalizing the video platform. I ran into trouble with the add videos page in the admin
panel. This page was the most important one, and it was the page that needed the most coding. It is known, that with
6
every new line of code there are higher chances for bugs and that the amount of bugs increase. This was not easily solved,
every time I would fix a bug, another error would appear.

After a lot of testing and debugging it started showing less bugs. Eventually, there were no more bugs and the page was
fully working.
The main problem during my work on the admin panel was the appearance of the manager requirement. I didn’t know
about this requirement before, but it came up and it had to be added. This set me back a few steps. I had to go back to the
different methods and functions that I already had programmed and I needed to change and tweak them. Of course this
brought many different errors, and I had to spend my time fixing them again.

6: A bug is an error, flaw, failure, or fault in a program's source code.