Introducing Google video site maps
During November 2006, Google bought YouTube.com for a reported US$1.6 billion. They must have this good reason for this. Since then video content has become ubiquitous on the Internet.
Universal search and video indexing
Google's universal search intended to break down the silos of information on the Internet and to compare and rank the diverse sets of information in order to service user’s queries. Universal search delivers integrated results for video, images, maps, box and webpages and is part of Google's quest to provide the best results to its users.
Indexing of video has always been an issue with the Search Engine spiders unable to extract information directly from its content. To overcome this, Google introduced the video site map.
Site maps and video site maps
If you are new to site maps, they are simply XML files that the list URLs for websites. They are an easy and effective way to inform Search Engines of the pages that make up a website and those that are available to be crawled. Not only do they contain information about the URLs, they can also contain other meta data to allow the search engines to crawl their these pages more intelligently.
Video site maps are similar to a regular site maps and use an extension of the site map protocol that allows specific meta data to be searchable by Google. Information including the description of the video, title, duration and keywords may be included in the video site map together with a link to the URL hosting the video. A thumbnail for the video can also be included but where this is missing Google will try to create a default thumbnail based on the content of the video that it finds.
The following file types are supported at present. .mpg, .mpeg, .mp4, .mov, .wmv, .asf, .avi, .ra, .ram, .rm, .flv.
Video site maps are potentially great news for website owners if they want to get their video content indexed and included in Google's Universal Search. Prior to video site maps, you were only this able to include a text transcript of the video content on your website. While this provided material for indexing purposes, it did not directly associate the video with that material and your website. So it was difficult to be included in Google's Universal Search and to get ranked the your video content. With video site maps, all of this has changed. Not only can you specify the title, description and keywords associated with your video, you can also include a link back to your website.
Creating a Google video site map
As mentioned earlier Google video site maps use a standard site map protocol with additional meta tag information. Some of the tags are mandatory while many are optional. The minimum required content for a video site map is a simple tag showing Google the URL of the video.
With the option to add more information to the site map it makes every sense to include as much detail as possible if you want to take advantage of your videos being indexed and included in search results.
A video site map example
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
xmlns:video="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-video/1.1">
<url>
<loc>http://www.seotranscript.com/</loc>
<video:video>
<video:player_loc allow_embed="yes">http://www.seotranscript.com/video/batman.swf</video:player_loc>
<video:thumbnail_loc>http://www.seotranscript.com/thumb/batman.jpg</video:thumbnail_loc>
<video:title>Captioning and Transcript services</video:title>
<video:description>Transcription and Captioning services for improved SEO and web accessibility</video:description>
<video:rating>4.2</video:rating>
<video:view_count>12345</video:view_count>
<video:tag>transcription</video:tag>
<video:tag>caption</video:tag>
<video:tag>seo</video:tag>
<video:category>SEO</video:category>
<video:family_friendly>yes</video:family_friendly>
<video:duration>200</video:duration>
</video:video>
</url>
</urlset>
loc
This defines the landing page of the video or where the video should be launched from. It is your opportunity to get Google to include this link for the video that you show your webpage.
content_loc and player_loc
You'll need to identify the actual location of the video file or the URL pointing to the player of video.
thumbnail_loc
A URL pointing to a thumbnail image of the video.
Title
Title a title for the video maximum want out 100 characters
Description
The description of the video. Descriptions longer than 2048 characters will be truncated.
Tag
Keyword descriptions of the video. Up to 32 tags are allowed
Full information on all the tags are available here
When creating your video site map, you can include up to 10,000 video items in the file provided that the overall file size is no greater than 10 MB. Take care that your robots.txt file to set to allow Google bought to access the video site map.
Submitting video site map to Google
This process is the same as for submitting a regular site map. Use the video Webmaster tools interface to specify the location of the uploaded video site map on your website Google. Once submitted, Google will indicate whether there are any formatting problems or errors with your site map and detail any problem that it encounters reading it.
Conclusion
Video site maps are great way of getting your videos indexed by Google for the content and keywords that you choose and ultimately driving more traffic to your landing pages.