How to Create a XML Video Sitemap for Video Search Ranking

If you are a Blogger who creates videos regularly and uploads them to Youtube, then its time you should create a sitemap for these videos which are embedded on your blog and get them indexed in the Google Search Engine. Millions of videos are uploaded and embedded and its hard to find them, which is the reason a XML Video Sitemap of these videos can help you in getting them indexed in a better way and make sure that these videos are displayed in the search result pages.

Creating a video takes a lot of time and resources and its sad when you find that your useful videos are not viewed by people, while other useless videos are shown to the people who search in the Google. Hence a better sitemap would be helpful to the video uploaders in getting more number of viewers. Google delivers relevant content with the video index and the tags, information provided with the videos. The same index is updated whenever new videos are found by Google and displays the same in the Search Results.

This is quite similar to the normal xml sitemaps which are submitted to Google, Yahoo, Baidu & Bing search engines.

Google needs the following items for indexing the videos and displaying them in the search results.

• Title
• Description
• Play page URL
• Thumbnail image URL
• Raw video file location

All this information can be automatically grabbed using a WordPress Plugin which would automate all this process and give you a ready made video-sitemap.xml. To get started you should download and install a copy of a WordPress Plugin called as ‘Google XML Sitemap for Videos‘ which will scan all your content and create a xml formatted sitemap file. Under the Tools > Video Sitemap pahe you can find a option to check which says ‘Include video length? (Not recommended for sites will large number of videos)’. Once you are done, you need to click on ‘Generate Video Sitemap’ and the same would be generated.

Next you need to login to your Google Webmasters Account and under the Site configuration > Sitemaps > Submit a Sitemap the same way you normally submit other xml sitemaps. The Video Sitemap would give Google complete information related to your videos and make Google crawl your website in a better way and identify your videos.