Fairfax Video Studio

Tips for Creating an Effective Video Sitemap

Every website should have a site map.  It acts as a table of contents for crawlers and spiders that index your pages.  Your most important page is not your home page.  Your most important pages are buried in your site, targeting searchers who are typing long tail, specific keywords into Google and other search engines.  In order for the crawlers to find all of these pages, you should submit a sitemap to Google, Yahoo! and Bing.  For more information on site maps, click here.

Just as important for SEO is video sitemaps.  Remember that crawlers can’t yet interpret video like they can text.  For this reason, you need to optimize your videos and submit a video sitemap.   Check out those links for more details on getting started.  Here are a few tips to get the most out of your video sitemaps:

• Include high-quality thumbnails – Google and other search engines will use a thumbnail image of your video in search results.  Submit one that looks good and is at least 120 x 90 pixels.

• Update your sitemap often – If you remove videos from your site, make sure to update your video sitemap.  You don’t want users finding your content in a search engine, only to be taken to a broken link.  As you upload new videos, also update your sitemap so that they can be indexed.  This is especially important if your videos include any time sensitive material.

• Get specific – Video sitemaps allow you to geo-target, categorize and rate your content.  Make sure those long tail keyword searches are finding your videos!

Creating and updating video sitemaps may seem like a daunting task, but it is well worth it if you are already spending the time and money to create video.  Call us today at 877.477.STUDIO for information on creating web videos of your own.