Branching off from my Basic XML Sitemap Guide, we can work with advanced features such as including video in the search engine results pages. I’d suggest you read my Basic XML Sitemap Guide if you don’t already know about XML Sitemaps. So how do we create a Video Sitemap. We need to create an XML file in the same way as a normal XML file. The video sitemap is still the same kind of XML file that you use for your HTML pages except there is a <video:video> tag within the<url> tag. This video tags houses a lot more tags for information than a standard sitemap url submission file. If you take a look at the below example from Google’s Help you can see the difference in the size of a single submission.
The first thing that you will notice that is different is on the first line there is now the following xmlns:video=”http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-video/1.1″ this is the schema for a video and tells the search engines, specifically Google, that this is a video sitemap.
Secondly there is a lot of additional tagging . Within the <video:video> tag there is only one requirement, that is that you must have either <video:content_loc> or <video:player_loc> the first one will be the url of the video content, this is not the page which it sits on, but the link to the avi swf or whatever format you may choose. Google can crawl the following video file types: .mpg, .mpeg, .mp4, .mov, .wmv, .asf, .avi, .ra, .ram, .rm, .flv. The URL of the page which the video sits on is put in the <loc> tag that you get in the normal sitemap structure. <video:player_loc> this is location of the player that is used to play the file, usually an swf player. If you do use this however you MUST include the <video:content_loc>. Most of the other tags are self explanitory like <video:thumbnail_loc>, <video:title>, <video:description>, <video:rating>, <video:view_count> and <video:tag>.
Also if you look at certain tags like <video:rating> <video:view_count> you would expect these to change. You could create your XML using PHP, ASP, or whatever platform you are using, on the fly so that the data is fresh.
Once your sitemap file is complete it is just a case of uploading your new video sitemap to your server and pointing your webmaster console to the new video sitemap and await spidering.
An XML sitemap is a big thing nowadays in the world of SEO and websites. What you do with this is help out the search engines by telling them what pages to spider. In return you get a lot of juicy features for your site. Think of it as like a Search Engine Control Panel, well in Googles case at least.
The first thing you will need is an xml file that houses all of your site’s page URL’s there are many generators that you can use for this, Links to these can be found at the bottom of the page.
For each page on your site you need a <url> block this must contain the <loc> tag as this is a requirement of the XML sitemaps protocol. <loc> is the full URL of your page and must be less than 2048charachters in length.
Optional XML Sitemap Components
<lastmod>, <changefreq> and <priority> are optional tags that you can have within the <url> tag. <lastmod> is the date the page was last modified. This needs to be in the format YYYY-MM-DD. <changefreq> is how how often you think the page is likely to change. This will not mean the spider will come dependent on what you put here tho. Values you should put in here are:
always
hourly
daily
weekly
monthly
yearly
never
The sitemap.org site declares that you should put this in as a ‘hint’ and not a command. Lastly there is the <priority> tag, in this we enter a number from 0.0 to 1.0. What I normally do with the priority is assign 1st level pages as 1.0, second level pages as 0.8 and so on defendant on the depth of your sites structure.
Ideally you want to try to include all of your URL’s that are in your site. And make sure that you include your url and priority as a minimum. Search engines can get the <lastmod> data from your server if it has been set up correctly.
You don’t really want to be hand typing these sitemaps. You could be there for days. Below there are some tools that can automatically spider and generate your file for you. The 2 tools below are free to use and very easy to use indeed. When you have created the file you need to save it somewhere on your website.
Getting your Sitemap XML Noticed
The most easiest way to make sure your XML Sitemap gets noticed is to add a line to your robots.txt file in the root of your server. If you don’t have one there then you should, this is the first file a spider will look at when it hits your site. The line you need to add in here is
This pretty much covers all search engines that use the sitemap protocol. ALthough this way you will not get access to the information located in the webmaster consoles. To do that you need to get an account on Google, Yahoo and MSN verify your site and add your sitemap that way.
Sitemap XML Resources
Sitemap XML Creation Tools
http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/
http://www.auditmypc.com/free-sitemap-generator.asp
If you want to make it big on YouTube then your going to need something decent to put on there. If your a video blogger PLEASE don’t have a boring, monotonous, drone voice that reminds people of there most hated lecturers at college. Be happy, sound happy, smile and the whole world smiles. People will listen in time. Make your video interesting, topic is key think what people may be searching for in the future if you can and start to blog about before other people then your video will be ranking before theirs.
From a business point of view, making a viral video is most definitely best. So that people remember your brand you should watermark your logo or brand name in a corner, but not the bottom right as thats where the YouTube logo goes.
Don’t Bore me or other Viewers, scandalise, cause a debate, make it viral, make people comment the post like crazy.
2. Call to action
If you are a business and are using YouTube, remember the call to actions. This will be your main means of getting traffic, and possible conversion, from your video’s. As a rule of thumb i’d suggest and opening few frames with the video title any logo you have and a url of your site or business, the same as you would on a powerpoint presentation. See how Google do it with their opening slide here and this is similar for most of their videos. During the video you should watermark it with either a logo on one of the corner or a URL to your site.
And then finally a closing slide of around 10 seconds with the information that you had on the first portion of the video.
What this is doing is getting your brand and your URL in the viewers mind. Get yourself a top viral video and people will remember the video and automatically have your brand or URL in their mind.
3. Choosing a Title For Your Video
You should really dig out some SEO knowledge here, your title is everything. It needs to say what the video IS and in a short number of words. As with SEO get your main keywords to the left. For example
” PHP Tutorials – Object Oriented Programming – Part 1″
is a better title than “This is my first PHP Tutorial on Object Oriented Programming”
The second example there would be best in the description.
Also don’t spam the keywords with unnecessary keywords, it looks odd for the user and spamming really aint going to get you know where in the long run.
4. Give Your Video a Good description
On YouTube it is normally preferable to put your link to your site or a site directly at the start as shown below on the recent Cute with Chris video. (A much recommended watch by the way)
Unless you click on view more then the first line is all you see, and ideally you’d really want people to see your link so that they can follow through and you get that all important traffic. Further in the more info you would describe the video and any valuable information to accompany the video.
5. Add Some Tags To the Video
Tags on your video I like to compare to meta keywords on your HTML page. Although in YouTube and other video sites they will have a bit more relevance to the search. In the olden days of YouTube you could spam it in the same way as you would in 1999 when you could put Britney Spears in your meta keywords and be expected to rank. With Googles acquisition of YouTube in November 2006 a lot of there search technology became part of the YouTube System. My tips on this what ever keywords you have in your title and description put them in here. As a rule of thumb I try to limit it to 10 keywords / phrases.
6. Annotations Are Handy But Don’t Spam
Onto some of the more recent features of YouTube, annotations let you visualise and comment on certain parts of your YouTube video. YouTube say that its a “way for you to add interactive commentary to your videos”
Almost instantly after I seen this go live, spammers started popping links up all over there videos and also very irrelevant. This was inevitable. The links however are not linkable in the annotations.
A more recent feature is pause annotations where by you can add in an amount of paused time to your video. This can be good to pause and point something out in your videos
7. Subtitles, Closed Captions and Translations
YouTube also lets you make your videos a bit more accessible and localised with the use of its subtitles feature. You need to create a simple text file with a line like this for each subtitle.
0:01:23.000,0:01:25.000
This is the information to be shown
0:01:23.000,0:01:25.000
This is the some more information to be shown
The top line with the numbers shows that this caption will be displayed from 1 min 23 seconds until 1min 25 seconds to create another caption you need to leave 1 blank line then repeat the process.
When it comes to saving the file if you have created the file in English save it as english.txt
Now an easy way to translate this for other users. You can quite simply go to Google Translate and just copy the text and translate and replace the text. You should then save it as say spanish.txt and upload.
YouTube have this really handy video on the site to help you understand the closed caption feature.
8. Have You Got More Videos, Create a Channel!
Channels are your own personalised public page upon YouTube. You can make this channel look however you want all of your new videos will be placed there, you can create playlists house your favorite videos and more importantly create a community around your videos. People can subscribe to your channel, see your subscriptions and also comment on your channel. To have a look at a fully fledged channel in action follow the below link to the BBC and Ableton Channels.
You can see that they have coloured the channel and added branding to the page. This can all be done in your channel setup. The BBC however have a more advanced channnel hence the header image, this is very costly tho in comparison to the FREE normal channel. You can access your channel setup from your accounts page on YouTube.
9. Embed Your Video On Your Site
Embedding your video on your site is simple, on the video page there is a right hand menu shown below. You can see from clicking the little gear icon it brings up a further menu. This is to help you customise your embedded player. You can change the size and the colour scheme of the player. When your ready to put it on your page copy the code in the embed field and paste into your sites html.
10. Socialise
Once your videos are up and embedded you want to get traffic to them. An easy way on YouTube is to post video replies onto other more popular videos. People will see that you have replied and follow your link to your video. However the internet is a nasty place and a lot of people really hide behind their internet persona’s so prepare for a lashing. Some people will be harsh and heavily criticise you for no reason in some case. This is the way of the internet tho.
One other ways to get people to your site is using the share link underneath all videos. This will let you post to all your favorite sites like YouTube, Myspace, Digg. You can also copy the link to share on IM / email and also use the little client to send the emails for you.
With regard to all videos you should share. You cannot rely solely on just placing the video there and expecting it to get big overnight. You need to put it in places where people will see it and spread it for themselves.
I had been putting off my Wordpress upgrade for some time, due to me not being bothered to do it. But on recent reading somewhere and finding out that version 2.7 will then have a 1-click upgrade utility I went right in there and did it. No more monotonous upgrades of Wordpress. Win!
