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.

And, it’s likely that you may have also scrolled down the page after watching the video and viewed some of the responses that were left for that video.

Now, most people are pretty good at leaving responses that are helpful, opinionated, give glowing reviews or suggest something that could be done better…but there are those “other” people who seem to have nothing better to do than to simply leave downright rude, obnoxious and sometimes flat-out inappropriate comments.

If you have a YouTube channel where you allow people to comment and have run across folks like these, there’s good news!  You can now block these users from posting.

Here’s how:

1. Sign into your YouTube account.
2. Go to http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=[YOURUSERNAME]&view=subscribers
3. This page will show you the users who are subscribed to your channel.  Below their thumbnail image is a “block” button.
4. Click on the block button to remove the user’s active subscription to you.  You’ll then receive a conformation asking if you want to remove the user from your subscribers.

Now, some people have reported that this method isn’t working for them.  So here’s another option for you, a little more on the tedious side but should get the job done.

1. Login to YouTube.com.
2. Go to your “Address Book” page.
3. Under “New” tab, click on “Contact”.  A dialog box will appear.
4. In that box, enter in the username of the account you want to remove.
5. Go to the top and click on the “block” tab.  The user will now be blocked.
6. After blocking, you can then delete them from your contact list.
7. Head back to your channel and check your subscribers box.  The account should be gone.

Resources:

• http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/youtube/thread?tid=49419c622c7b590e&hl=en
• http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/youtube/thread?tid=064a75aa23ba2fa7&hl=en#all

The good news is, this is very easy to do just by making a small edit to the URL.

Here’s what we’ll use as the example video.  This video talks about reconsideration requests in Google’s Webmaster Tools area:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntJhrM7CU5I

But let’s say that I only want to point viewers to a certain spot in that video, which starts to talk about how to gather further information in the Google Webmaster Tools area.  This is about 36 seconds into the video.

In this case I would just add the following to the end of the URL:  #t=0m36s

You’ll need to add the #t= and then add the number of minutes (in my case 0 minutes) and then the number of seconds (I chose 36 seconds into the video).

If I wanted to instead link to the 2 minute 12 second portion I’d then add to the URL #t=2m12s.

So here’s that link again with the point in time that I want to link to.  If you click on the link you’ll see that you’re immediately taken to that spot in the video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntJhrM7CU5I#t=0m36s

This is a great help to those who only want to reference certain points in long videos without making their viewer sit and wait for the entire video.