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Video marketing has its unique advantages. It is one of the strongest mediums to sell your products, create awareness about your product or services and build a great brand around the video.
Youtube, Google Videos, metacafe, Yahoo Videos have opened new doors for video marketing. One of the best ways to let the whole world know about your video is promotion through the video marketing websites using the well documented video marketing techniques.
Another simple and easier step is to let search engines crawl the videos. If you are a creator and distributor of videos as a medium of communication then it is always not possible to market each video specifically in the respective websites.
The following would be the simple guidelines to create video sitemaps and let search engines like Google index and display then in their Video sections.
Guidelines for Video Sitemaps
- A video sitemap as the name suggests should contain only the URLs that refer to the video content of your website. The video content includes web pages that have embedded videos in them, having players which display your videos or URLs of raw video content (eg downloadable links of videos). You should be very particular that you have these things in the given URL by the sitemap.
- In the sitemap make sure that you write one one video:video for each of the video.
- If you have multiple videos hosted in the same web page use separate entries <video : video> with different <video :player_loc> or <video :content_loc> tag for easier and better identification. This is a necessary piece of information for Googlebot to locate and index your video.
- Each sitemap should not have more than 50,000 videos. In case you are having more than 50,000 videos then you can submit multiple sitemaps and then a sitemap index file.
- Google can crawl the following video file types: mpg, .mpeg, .mp4, .m4v, .mov, .wmv, .asf, .avi, .ra, .ram, .rm, .flv, .swf. All files must be accessible via HTTP.
- Interestingly robots.txt is considered superior and is considered as a gatekeeper by Googlebot so make sure that you are not blocking the URLs given in the video sitemap by the robots.txt.
- Google crawlers will check that the information you include in the
<video:title>and<video:description>fields matches your live site. [It simply means that you have an option to use descriptive text to support your videos and if you use them properly, then this will work as a gateway for lots of traffic]
As it happened in HTML pages indexing, the fields of <video: title> and <video: description> would lead to better way of judging the relevance of the video, since this is the nascent stage of the video sitemap submission and indexing of videos we can assume that a very descriptive and accurate detail in the above mentioned tags will reap benefits. **Please make sure that you are not using these tags for keyword stuffing, they will catch you!!
Sample of Video sitemap
[Taken from Google Webmaster’s Forum]
<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.diffion.com/videos/some_video_landing_page.html</loc>
<video:video>
<video:content_loc>http://www.diffion.com/video123.flv</video:content_loc>
<video:player_loc>http://www.diffion.com/videoplayer.swf?video=123</video:player_loc>
<video:thumbnail_loc>http://www.diffion.com/thumbs/123.jpg</video:thumbnail_loc>
<video:title>Video marketing tips</video:title>
<video:description>Ways to make your videos popular</video:description>
<video:rating>4.2</video:rating>
<video:view_count>12345</video:view_count>
<video:publication_date>2007-11-05T19:20:30+08:00</video:publication_date>
<video:expiration_date>2009-11-05T19:20:30+08:00</video:expiration_date>
<video:tag>SEO</video:tag>
<video:tag>Videos-marketing</video:tag>
<video:category>Internet-marketing</video:category>
<video:family_friendly>yes</video:family_friendly>
<video:duration>600</video:duration>
<video:restriction relationship=”allow”>IE GB US CA</video:restriction>
</video:video>
</url>
</urlset>
For the various usage of the Tags you can look into our post on Video specific tag definition.
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