How to Create a Video Sitemap

Video can be a tremendously powerful component to your online presence and marketing campaigns. They are easily sharable, and, according to Forrester Research, search optimised videos are 53 times more likely to land on page one of the SERPs. One of the ways you can optimise your video is to create a sitemap. Since an algorithm cannot watch your videos, it has no way of knowing what is contained therein – unless you have a sitemap, of course.

Sitemaps are simply XML files that tell Google and other search engines what content you are featuring on your site. Video sitemaps tell the bots key information, including:

• Title.
• Keywords.
• Description.
• Thumbnail URL.
• Playpage URL.
• Raw video location.
• Running time.

From there, making your video sitemap is a matter of entering this information into an XML file. Open a new file and save it as VideoSitemap.xml or something similar. Then you’d start your description:

• The first tag links the video with its landing page. Example:

<urlset xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″

xmlns:video=”http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-video/1.0″>

• Next, is your sitemap file. Example:

<url>

<loc>http://site.com/example_landing_page.html</loc>

• Then the video landing page URL. Example:

<video:video>

<video:content_loc>http://site.com/example_video1.wmv</video:content_loc>

• The video URL. Example:

<video:description>The Example Video</video:description>

• Various tags. Here’s a title tag:

<video:title>Best Video Ever</video:title>

Include the other tags that Google wants (such as description, thumbnail location, etc.)  These are set up the same way, and you can find the specific tags at Google’s video sitemap location.

You can also skip doing all of this yourself and use a sitemap generator like XML-Sitemap, Video-Sitemap, or one of the other paid options out there.