Welcome guys! Today’s topic of SEO: Video SiteMap

Heard that anytime?

Its’ rather a new term for many of us, many who are new to SEO. It’s, however, an old thing to SEO experts at V-Empower Inc. They’ve been working on it since their start…!! Anyway, lets check how a video site map differs from normal site map, what are its’ features, uses, benefits, creation, submission, etc.

First of all, let me tell you… ‘A Video SiteMap is NOT a Video of your site map’, if you are thinking that!’ – it’s a sitemap which has your video details in it…. Got me?

A sitemap, if you remember from our last discussion, is nothing but a map our website, showing all the links available, arranged in chronological order for easy navigation (User friendly) and for easy indexing of all the website links by the search engines (Search engine-friendly) – that’s all, ain’t it?

Well yes! Its’ very much of a perfect definition unless you add any videos to your website; videos which you may wish to be shown in search engine results! Yes, though not a complex concept but putting plainly, ‘A sitemap will NOT display your videos unless your videos are optimized and have been included in a particular specified format in your usual textual sitemap’.

Note-worthy Notes:

1. You must add the landing page location, exact video url, thumbnail view address, duration, title and keyword rich description and if its family friendly or not, etc.  
2. Compatible video types include: .mpg, .mpeg, .mp4, .mov, .wmv, .asf, .avi, .ra, .ram, .rm, .flv and need to be directly available via HTTP which means no streaming media.
3. Including proper tags will help drive decent traffic to your video and also help Google properly index it. The included video URLs will then be searchable via Google Video and may even appear in other search products offered by Google.
4. There can be up to 50,000 video urls in a sitemap file and the file must be no larger than 10MB uncompressed.

Let us now see as how to create a video site map:

A specified set of codes are to be written for each video of your website and this is included in your textual sitemap. Lets’ have a look at a sample video sitemap:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=80472

There are many tools available online for FREE video sitemap creation. Few of them are listed below… check them out!

Submitting Your Video Sitemap to Google:

This is a real important step. You only need to add it to your site in the Google Webmaster tools sitemap area. The file must be at a publicly available URL so Google can pull it into the system. Alternatively, you can tell Google where to find your video sitemap via placement within your robots.txt file.

That’s all for the day folks! Take Care!

Search Engine Optimizer,

V-Empower Inc – Empowering People. Topic Today: Video Site Maps

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