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.
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
xmlns:video="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-video/1.1">
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/videos/some_video_landing_page.html</loc>
<video:video>
<video:content_loc>http://www.site.com/video123.flv</video:content_loc>
<video:player_loc allow_embed="yes">http://www.site.com/videoplayer.swf?video=123</video:player_loc>
<video:thumbnail_loc>http://www.example.com/thumbs/123.jpg</video:thumbnail_loc>
<video:title>Grilling steaks for summer</video:title>
<video:description>Get perfectly done steaks every time</video:description>
<video:rating>4.2</video:rating>
<video:view_count>12345</video:view_count>
<video:publication_date>2007-11-05T19:20:30+08:00.</video:publication_date>
<video:tag>steak</video:tag>
<video:tag>meat</video:tag>
<video:tag>summer</video:tag>
<video:category>Grilling</video:category>
<video:family_friendly>yes</video:family_friendly>
<video:duration>600</video:duration>
</video:video>
</url>
</urlset>
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.
Simple
