Video Sitemap Generator Increases Rankings

Posted by Dave in SEO, Traffic, Video

If you are using video to market your services or products and want to have visitors – and potential customers – show up at your site then there is one heavy weight player that you need to be aware of – Google.

Google has made it abundantly clear that video is important. They have even done us the favor of spelling out what you need to do to help Google find your video content so they can index and rank your video content in their search engine results.

Guess what? Google likes to see information about your video in a certain format. And I have to admit, it is not altogether pretty.

Google Video Sitemaps

There is a certain type of file, an xml file, that you can submit to Google that includes information about your videos.

This file provides details like a title, a description, the page the video is on, the location of the video content (this is different then the page the video is on), and a thumbnail of the video. Optionally, you can provide information regarding the video length, if and when the video expires, how many views the video has seen, when you published the video, descriptive tags, a category, is it family friendly or not, and any restrictions on where the video can be viewed.

Would you like to see what the file content looks like?

Told you it wasn’t pretty.

Video Sitemap Generator

If you are putting videos on Youtube, then what I am about to share isn’t relevant.

But if you are putting video content on your own sites – where you can control the visitor’s experience, and importantly, you own the content – then here is a way to generate a Google friendly video sitemap in just minutes.

I’ll start by saying that providing four of the five required pieces of information is very straightforward. It’s the last one that matters the most.

If you are using a professional video player like EZS3, then the location of the video content is typically “encrypted” to make it difficult for people to access your video directly. Unfortunately, this also makes it almost impossible to create a video sitemap.

Never fear, I wouldn’t lead you down this path without a solution.

EZS3 Sitemap Generator

Let’s assume you are using EZS3 to host your videos.

Using the EZS3 video sitemap generator provided here, type in the “easy” required stuff – location of the page that has the video on it, the video thumbnail location, title for the video, and a description of the video.

All that is left to do is provide the Video Content Location.

Go into your EZS3 account, find the video you want to create a sitemap for.

You can do this by:

1) Clicking on “Manage Players” for one of the supported formats like flv, MP3, Camtasia Studio, mov, wmv, etc.

2) Select Player to Edit – choose one of the videos and click on the “View Player” button.

3) Scroll to the bottom of the page and click on either “Javascript Code” or “HTML code”, click the Select Code button, then copy the content (Ctrl-C for the PC and Command-C for the Mac).

Now go back to the EZS3 video sitemap generator and paste in the contents you use copied to the Video Content Location box.

Now that the required information is out of the way, there are just a couple optional pieces of information I recommend you provide.

One of the them is the Video Duration and the other is Video Tags. Video Tags are short one or two word phrases that describe your video. For instance, if this article was a video, I would probably add “video sitemap“, “google” and “EZS3” as tags (one per line).

Finally, click on the Submit button at the bottom.

Create A Video Sitemap Page

If everything went well, then a new content box appeared at the top with instructions to “Copy and Paste this content into a .xml file, i.e. – video.xml, on your site.

Do just that. You don’t have to use the filename “video.xml”, that was just a suggestion. You could use something like “video-sitemap.xml”. Just make sure the filename ends with a .xml.

That’s it, you’re done. If you want, you can go over to the Google Webmaster area and submit your newly created video sitemap. Or …

Bonus

Here is an extra tip to help with getting your newly created video sitemap found.

If you use the Google XML sitemaps plugin with Wordpress, then from your Wordpress dashboard click on Settings > XML-Sitemaps, scroll about half way down the page and click on “Add new page”. Add the link to your newly created video sitemap, i.e. – http://www.example.com/video.xml, set the priority to 0.7, Change Frequency to Always, and add the current data in YYYY-MM-DD format. This will provide a link from our Google sitemap to your video sitemap.

Next, go to http://www.pingoat.com/, type in your site’s name, site’s URL, i.e. – http://www.example.com, and your video feed, i.e. – http://www.example.com/video.xml.

After I used pingoat, the Google bot found my video.xml file just 7 short seconds later. Sweet!

You Just Gave Google What It Wants

If Google finds your video content useful and relevant, you can expect to see more visitors to your video website.

EZS3 video sitemap generator

Dave Wooding is a true genius when it comes to making the most out of this stuff. It should come as no surprise that he has also created an EasyVideoPlayer Video Sitemap Generator.

Tags: dave wooding, ezs3, google video sitemap, video sitemap, video sitemap generator

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