How To Write A Video Sitemap

If you own a website then you probably already know what a sitemap is, well a video sitemap is similar to the sitemap you would have at the moment but just for videos. Video sitemaps help google to find your videos and a small bit of information on what that videos is about. I’ll tell you what you need to add to your video sitemap to help google, once you have created your video sitemap you should submit it through googles webmaster tools section like you would a normal sitemap.

The first thing you should start off with in the video sitemap is the title of the video, for this example I will make a video called “yellow fish”. So my title in the sitemap for this video would be “yellow fish.

The next thing you would add is a description of the video telling google what it is about and mentioning the name of the video, so in my case I would write a description abit like this ” This video is about yellow fish found all round the world and live in fresh water streams”. Bit of a poor description as its not compelling but you can see from my example how I have added the title of the video into the description.

Once you have added the title and description google also wants you to add the url of the video so it knows where the above information relates t0o and the video your trying to get indexed. The play url is the one that will be indexed. Also add a url to your video thumbnail so google can grab it and put it up in the search results.

Finally you should add a url to the location of the video on your server, so this isnt the page displaying your video but the url to it on your server.

Once you have built your sitemap simply login to webmaster tools and submit as normal through, google will then crawl it and use the information as it sees fit. Googles doesn’t have to index every bit of content it finds but videos at the moment are being indexed pretty quickly especially if you have a video sitemap.

If I have missed anything just leave a comment and I’ll add it with credits to yourself.

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