Video Sitemaps Can Mean Loads of Traffic
Video is incredibly popular online; I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that. But, there is a way that you can help the traffic that your videos receive by using what’s called a video sitemap.
Similar to a sitemap that you’d use on your site to help your visitors navigate through your content or the search engines to discover all of the pages on your site, a video sitemap will help the search engines discover those videos that you’ve created which may be self-hosted; that is, not placed on sites like YouTube.
You see, sites like YouTube get indexed often and you don’t necessarily have to do anything in particular to your videos aside from some basic SEO when you add them. But, if you host videos on your own site or use Amazon’s S3 program then you’ll need a way for those videos to get discovered by the search engines and that way is by using a video sitemap.
Now, these video sitemaps require a bit of coding on your part since they’re written in XML format and Google has a very in-depth tutorial on how to do that.
But, what you may find more helpful is this nearly hour and a half long webinar that REEL SEO did with Google. REEL SEO provides advice and services on video marketing specifically and in this webinar, they cover the aspects of Video Sitemaps which may help you out quite a bit more than just reading through the tutorial itself.
When you’re finished with the video, you can also read a very thorough Q&A session that occurred after the webinar.
So if you’ve got some time, self-host your own videos and want to know how to get those indexed then the following video is for you.