Video & Video Sitemaps: That’s Some Sexy Site Architecture

With the launch of Google Caffeine and after talk at SMX Advanced 2010 in Seattle, Google’s made it clear that they will start looking more at video sitemaps when indexing websites. Why? Because they’re sexy! Videos are slick, compelling and fun, and people like them. And what does Google like? Things that people like.

Videos and Video Sitemaps themselves are not brand new, but there are related changes in the Google landscape that make them more important.

Universal Search
This actually isn’t brand new either, but many people probably still don’t really know about it. I’ll guess you have noticed over the last several years that pretty pictures and such have been popping up on the Google results pages. This is Google intuitively guessing what kind of content you’re looking for, and pulling the appropriate rich media or other targeted results right into their main search results (see the results snapshot below for “monkeys jumping on the bed”). This is in contrast to a user clicking on what Google calls their “vertical search” options, like Videos, Maps, or Books, to only search that type of content.

Soul Search before Universal Search
This was actually a popular point at this year’s SMX Advanced: Before making yourself crazy trying to get your videos listed in universal search, examine your video pages. It would be a shame to nab a top spot in Google for a page that doesn’t work for you, especially if you had another page on your site already listed prominently in the search results. So just consider: Does this video represent my brand well? Does this video page have supporting copy and calls to action that encourage further engagement with my brand? Am I making it easy for people to share my video with friends or on their social media networks?

You’ve Got the Video
The sexiness is there, the brand is represented well, the video is shareable. Time to optimize that video – make sure the on-page content supports it appropriately, that any on-page titles and descriptions are set up, and generate a video sitemap to help Google find and index your videos.

• If you’re setting up your videos in YouTube, it’s wise to include your URL at the beginning of the description, so it appears in the minimized view.
• There is a list of required tags that should be added to each video in your sitemap, including things like title, description, page location, file type and then plenty more technical items that you should ask your developer about.
• Google just recently made a public reminder of a few other best practice tips for incorporating video into your site, including: Verify your videos URLs are “crawlable,” use specific tags to tell Google what countries your video can be played in (what language it’s in), and be sure to indicate when the video is removed from the page.

The point of video is really to give your user something to look at besides boring text, and to keep them coming back for that sexy video action. By following a few simple tactics, you can also be sure that Google knows about and comes back for that same good stuff. And if truly set up appropriately, they’ll be glad to see you’re generating this kind of user-loved content!