So back in December of 2007 Google’s Video team announced changes to their sitemap protocol. Specifically changes to the way Google uses sitemaps to index your video content. Now this can be done for a number of different sites that have videos, but would be an absolute killer change for sites that contain mostly video content, and we all know there are a lot out there.
How do I create my video sitemap according to the standards?
To create your video sitemap, even if you just have a dozen or so videos on your site, or even less, and just want to test out the service to see what kind of exposure your video’s get now that Google can crawl them and pick up meta data about the video such as aspect ratio, runtime, etc. I would take a look at the step by step guide to creating video sitemaps here.
How do I submit my Video Sitemap to Google?
Again, you can use the guide set up on Google’s Webmaster Guide for this topic. I have also added a screenshot below of where you would go to do the submission.
[caption id="attachment_327" align="alignleft" width="258" caption="Google Video Sitemap Submission"]
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If anyone feels like they have more to add to this quick guide on video sitemap creation, submission, feel free to leave comments, tips, suggestions and I will give appropriate credit to whoever submits an actual valid tip that I use, but as always feel free to leave comments about general SEO, SEM and Local Search as well. Questions are usually answered within one business day, and if can’t be answered as a quick FAQ, I’ll let you know that as well.
Another note worth mentioning is that when your videos do end up getting indexed by Google amd emd up on YouTube there will be the ability to easily embed videos in to certain websites, so in essence this makes your video content “portable”, which is huge.
