You want Google to find your pages, right? Of course you do, that’s how you get the search engine to index your pages and in turn boost your chances of turning up in the rankings. Any SEO will tell you that there are a lot of things you have to do to boost your chances in the rankings and one of these is to submit your sitemap to search engines for indexing. But what about your videos?
Submitting your sitemap to search engines basically makes them quickly aware of the structure, size and content of your website making them more likely to approve of your site and increase its visibility in their listings. Of course this is only a small portion of things you should do to improve your sites visibility but at least it’s a start. What Google are now doing is trying to get webmasters with video content to submit a video sitemap for indexing.
Video content is clearly one of the most popular rich media formats so it’s apparent why Google think this is a good idea. The end result of this would be that while you can boost the profile of your videos in search engines you can also have more control over how Google returns your video results. This includes the title, keywords thumbnail image and if the video has a limited viewing period you can set this as well as when the content expires.
If you host a lot of video content on your site then it would definitely be worth providing a video sitemap to Google. Remember to include all pages with video content that you want indexed as well as any page with video or flash player features. To get started there are some great resources available on the Google Webmaster Central Sitemap help centre on creating your sitemap. Once it’s ready you can use webmaster tools to submit it or find out how to submit it using your robots.txt file.
It’s great way to make your content more available on the web and certainly won’t do your site any harm. If you’re more of an image kind of person or have gone indexing mad, then why not look into our post on indexing images.
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