If you want to get your video contents searchable via Google Video Search, you better start creating sitemaps for these videos. With the Google video sitemaps, you can tell Google’s metacrawlers about all the video contents on your site, including these videos’ metadata.
As defined by Google, video sitemaps:
“is an extension of the Sitemap protocol that enables you to publish and syndicate online video content and its relevant metadata to Google in order to make it searchable in the Google Video index.”
When the video sitemaps is submitted to Google, the video URLs will be made searchable on Google Video. Google Video will also display a thumbnail image which can either be autogenerated by Google or created by the user. Creating a sitemaps for videos would also make the videos appear in other Google search products.
Video sitemaps covers all video contents in various format which can be crawled by Google. These includes .mpg, .mpeg, .mp4, .mov among many other standard video formats.
To guide you in creating sitemaps for your video contents, here’s an example from Google:
<urlset xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″
xmlns:video=”http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-video/1.0″>
<url>
<loc>http://www.site.com/videos/some_video_landing_page.html</loc>
<video:video>
<video:content_loc>http://www.site.com/video123.flv</video:content_loc>
<video:player_loc allow_embed=”yes”>http://www.site.com/videoplayer.swf?video=123</video:player_loc>
<video:title>My funny video</video:title>
<video:thumbnail_loc>http://www.site.com/thumbs/123.jpg</video:thumbnail_loc>
</video:video>
</url><url>
<loc>http://www.site.com/videos/some_other_video_landing_page.html</loc>
<video:video>
<video:content_loc>http://www.site.com/videos/video1.mpg</video:content_loc>
<video:description>A really awesome video</video:description>
</video:video>
</url>
</urlset>
After creating your video sitemaps, you have to submit its URL to Google via the Webmaster Central. Make sure that you have uploaded the sitemaps files into the publicly accessible directory on your site.
