Creating a sitemap is one of the best ways to get sites like Google and Bing to crawl the content of your website, and it’s one of the basic starting points of an SEO endeavor. For sites that utilize a lot of embedded video (and we hope yours does) a video sitemap can be just as important and useful.
Whereas a sitemap tells search engines (and visitors, at a glance) what pages are on your site, a video sitemap tells search engines what video content you have on your site, which can help them index and rank the video content in their search results.
Typically, sitemaps are written in XML, or Extensible Markup Language. The code itself looks like a lot of gabbledeegook, but you can see how it neatly organizes your content:
A video sitemap can contain a lot of in-depth info about the video content on your site, such as the title, the page the video is on, the location of the video (where it is embedded from – YouTube, Facebook, Video, etc), the length and, perhaps most importantly, descriptive keyword tags.
If you are feeling up to trying it yourself, Reel SEO has a great guide to creating your own xml video sitemap. Google Webmaster Central recently released a walkthrough of their own. For those less inclined to tackle all that code, there are some paid generators (not an endorsement) that will create one for you. Either way, if you have a lot of video embedded on your site, this is one SEO tool that you should take advantage of right away.
About Steven Shattuck
Hi,
Many thanks to steven for such a great info. I came here to your blog & get to know about the video sitemap that how they can be useful for video seo!
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