The XML Video Sitemap: A Little-Known SEO Strategy

Do you know just how important it is to have an XML video sitemap? A WordPress video sitemap is in the .xml format that allows your site to tell various search engines that there are video URLs on your site that are ready for crawling and indexing.

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The Importance of an XML Video Sitemap

Google only supported video sitemaps starting a few years back, back in December 2007 to be exact. Video are rich media that people simply love. Just look at the popularity of YouTube. More so that internet connection speeds these days make it easier to watch videos at home. People are naturally more visually-inclined that’s why creating a video for your product, service or business opportunity has amazing marketing potentials. Videos are actually a little-known SEO strategy that not every internet marketer has discovered, yet. So you may want to get down to creating your own and building an XML video sitemap along with it.

Getting Started: Video Creation

Sure you can have a professional team to create your videos for you, but that won’t be a cost-effective move. There are now many available tools to help you create professional-looking videos without the price tag. So give it a try, and you’ll be quite surprised.
Nonetheless, there are still some things you can do to optimize your videos and get them ready for distribution.
1. Multiple formats – Allow your views the option to choose which format to play since there may be running different operating systems and varying internet connection speeds.
2. Name your files properly – Though Googlebots can’t watch your videos, they certainly can read your text files, including the file name in your XML video sitemap.
3. On-page SEO – Make sure the page on which your video is embedded actually have relevance to your content. This lets Google to understand what the video is all.

Google Guidelines for an XML Video Sitemap

Now that you’ve got a good number of videos created and ready for posting on your site, it’s time to take a look at the guidelines you should keep in mind when building your video sitemap.

1. Every video sitemap for WordPress or mRSS feed file that you create should be under 50 MB when uncompressed. It must not contain more than 50,000 videos. If the uncompressed file is more than 50 MB, you can just opt to provide multiple Sitemaps as well as a Sitemap index file.
2. Make sure that you include every web page that have embedded videos, links to players of your videos, or the links to your raw videos hosted on your website.
3. You must provide all necessary information so that you can maximize the SEO potential of your videos. Required information for your XML video sitemap include Title, Description, the play page link, the thumbnail link, and the raw video file location and/or the player URL (SWF).
4. Remember that Googlebots can crawl the following video formats: mpg, .mpeg, .mp4, .m4v, .mov, .wmv, .asf, .avi, .ra, .ram, .rm, .flv, .swf so make sure that your videos are in these formats to be supported.
5. Check your robots.txt file to be sure that it’s not going to block any entry in your video sitemap especially the links for the video, play page, and the thumbnail.

Getting Your Videos Out There!

You got all your videos optimized and you’ve looked at Google’s guidelines on how your XML video sitemap should look like. But there’s an easier and better way to build your sitemap – with a video sitemap WordPress plugin!

With this plugin, you won’t have to worry about getting it right. Build your XML video sitemap with just one click! With Video SEO Pro, you’ll be able to get all your videos indexed!