Background:
If a picture is worth a thousand words, a professional-looking video can be worth even more. Google (and other search engines) know that people who visit websites often view videos to learn more about a company’s products, services or mission. Every minute, more than two hours of video is uploaded to YouTube. However, a search engine like Google can’t really understand the content inside a video. Just as a search engine has very limited abilities to be able to read words "locked" in a graphic, they can’t understand the words, content and images within a video (although that may change in the future). Google, for example, uses tags, video titles and descriptions to understand the content of a video, along with geographic location (i.e. Boulder, Colorado). With the explosion of video content on the Web, it’s more difficult than ever to make sure that search engines can cut through the cute home videos of cats playing piano, and deliver relevant search results for videos on your site. What’s a Video Site Map? According to Google’s Website, a Video Sitemap gives Google information about your video content, and tells them about content on your site they might not otherwise discover. Just like a sitemap on a site that’s designed for humans to read (it lists every page of your site), a video site map lists every page of your site that has video content on it, including a description of the video. (Not sure what a sitemap is all about? Read the description below >>) Here’s how an XML-based video sitemap will be displayed to a human: 
Here’s an example of an XML-based video sitemap, meant to be read by a search engine: 
Video-Specific Tags for a Video Sitemap: The following tags are a list of tags you can use to tell Google about your videos: - <loc>
– The location of the video; must be a unique URL - <video:thumbnail_loc>
– The link to the .jpg or .gif of the thumbnail of the video - <video:title>
– The title of the video; this is limited to 100 characters - <video:description>
– The description of the content of the video; limited to 2048 characters. - <video:duration>
– The duration of the video (in seconds). - <video:count>
– The number of times the video has been viewed - <video:publication_date>
– The date the video was first published - <video:tag>
– The tags that describe the video. For example, a video about grilling food may belong in the Grilling category, but could be tagged "steak", "summer", and "outdoor". Limited to 32 tags. - <video:category>
– The video’s category, such as cooking, religion or education.
There are other more technical tags, too, but these are the underlying tags that describe your video to Google. XML Sitemaps: If you already have a sitemap for your website in XML, you can create a second one for videos. You can create a Sitemap based on the Sitemap protocol, and then submit the feed directly to Google or post a link on your site. What’s A Sitemap? Just a few years ago, the philosophy about sitemaps went something like this: If your customers need to use a sitemap to find their way around your website, you haven’t done your job organizing your content and creating a navigational system that is easy to understand. But sitemaps are now back in favor. Why? It’s less about human visitors and more about search engines. What is a sitemap? A sitemap is page that lists all of the other pages on your site, usually in a bulleted list. Here’s an example of a sitemap: 
As I’ve discussed before, search engines are easily confused. Many pages of a website are often ‘hidden’ behind tricky menus or drop-down lists. Or, the links to reach a specific page are too deep (i.e. more than a couple of pages down from the home page). A sitemap, linked from the home page of the site, will list every page of your site in one convenient place. When a search engine visits your site map, it’s very easy for them to then get a list of every page on your site, and then crawl, digest and include all of your content in their system. We generally recommend having the link to your sitemap on the bottom footer navigation of your site. But you need to make sure that as your site changes, your sitemap is updated. Otherwise, Google and others may not index the latest pages placed on your site. Our PageDirector system, for example, automatically updates the sitemap each time a page is added, or the name of a page is changed. And even better than an HTML sitemap is an XML sitemap. An XML sitemap is a sitemap that is specifically formatted for search engines like Google. It’s a machine-readable version that allows you to specify all of the pages of the site. Here’s an example of an XML sitemap: 
Adding an XML sitemap ensures that a site will get indexed much more quickly and more rapidly than not using this method at all. For the site, www.GodintheWilderness.com, (a site devoted to my wife’s book that’s now in it’s 3rd printing by Random House), the XML sitemap allowed the site to be indexed in 3-4 days vs. the usual 3-4 months. (But then again, it’s my wife… so of course she gets all of the top-shelf website development stuff. Summary: If you have a lot of video on your site, a Video Sitemap can help with your search engine optimization and allow people to find your videos more easily. |