Adding video content is an effective Internet marketing strategy that not only attracts the attention of your site visitors but also boosts search rankings. Videos send the message across clearly and add interest to your site because the human eye is naturally attracted to moving images rather than a bunch of text.

However, not every video on your website will be found quickly by the search engine spiders looking for fresh content. If you’re publishing your own videos (not coming from YouTube), renowned Internet marketing expert James Schramko recommends creating and submitting a video sitemap for Google.

Purpose of Sitemaps

Sitemaps enable search engine bots to find all the content files of your website, index them and rank them accordingly. The more visible your files are to the search engines, the greater are your chances of landing on the top search results pages.

Creating Sitemaps

Google prefers to read sitemaps in XML format. Each sitemap should also contain not more than 50,000 URLs or should not be larger than 10MB when uncompressed, so it’s best to create several sitemaps for a site with lots of content.

A sitemap can be created in various ways.. You can create one manually using any of the sitemap protocols or save time by using a tool that can generate the code for you.

If you’re using a professional video player like EZS3, you may find it difficult to add the location of the video, which is an essential detail of your sitemap. James has figured out a way to add the video content location using the following steps:

In your EZS3 account:

Step 1: Find the video you want to create a sitemap for.
Step 2: Click on “Manage Players” to find any of the supported formats for videos (e.g. MP3, wmv).
Step 3: Select “Player to Edit”—choose one of the videos and click on the “View Player” button.
Step 4: When you scroll to the bottom of the page, you’ll find “Javascript Code” or “HTML Code”. Click on any one of these..
Step 5: Click “Select Code” button, then copy the content (Ctrl-C for PC users and Command-C for Mac users)
Step 6: Go back to EZS2 video sitemap generator and paste the contents you copied to the Video Content location box.

Aside from adding other details like the play page location, video thumbnail, title and description of the video, James Schramko also recommends adding the video duration to protect your contents as well as video tags which also help boost search rankings for Internet marketing purposes.

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