Importance Of Video Sitemaps For Video Search Engine Optimization

Are you still waiting for Googlebot to crawl your video?? If yes then you must be missing out something. Is it the video sitemap for your videos? The next questions that strike on your mind after reading this question are - what are video sitemap? How it works? How to create one? I will try to provide all the possible answers here.

As Youtube being the number 2 in terms of internet traffic (after Google), video is becoming an integral part of SEO which is termed as VSEO (Video Search Engine Optimization). In general search engines read text and hence are unable to read rich media content like Flash, iframes, Silverlight and other forms of video. Google; however can index the text contain in the flash files. So in general the content embedded in these file should also be available in text format, so as to allow the search engine to read it. Google can read .mpg, .mpeg, .mp4, .m4v, .mov, .wmv, .asf, .avi, .ra, .ram, .rm, .flv and .swf files format of videos, but from sitemap only.

The best way to make the video content readable is by creating video sitemaps. Video sitemap is the most excellent technique to let Google identify the rich video content. In video sitemap video content includes web pages that embed video, player’s URL for video, or the raw video content’s url posted on your site. If the content cannot be accessed by Google on these particular urls then those video will remain unnoticed by Googlebot.

Each URL in the video sitemap must have the following information:

•Title - Title of your video limited to 100 characters
•Description - Video description of 2048 characters is accepted in sitemap. The description longer than this will be reduced.
•Landing page URL – The web page where video is hosted.
•Player Location or content location – Both the content URL and the player URL are recommended but at least one of them is required. If these tags are not found, Google will not index your video.
•Thumbnail URL - This URL points to the URL of video thumbnail image file. The recommended size is 120x90 pixels and the recommended formats are .jpg, .png, or. Gif.

In addition, adding Video Tags would also help search engines understand the target audience. Maximum of 32 tags can be added for 1 video.

Good video SEO techniques like video sitemap creation can put your video in Google’s top results. Matt Cutts the Chief Engineer of the Google has also put emphasis on creating video sitemap to make the video visible in SERP.

By: Shilly

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Shilly Van a native of the United Kingdom and has the experience of more than 5 years in the field of internet marketing. She ia a famous writer and has written many articles on Business video production, video SEO, internet marketing,social media, web video production, optimization and many other related topics.