To fully optimize your videos for search engines you need to create a video sitemap. You cannot include your videos in your usual site map for URL content.
You can take the easy route and simply link to your video files, sending site traffic to the files (vs having them imbedded in a web page), but it is better to make videos available directly on your web pages.
Google accepts both XML and MRSS sitemaps. Which is better? For now, most SEO experts agree that you should always at least submit and XML sitemap, and include the location of your video XML sitemap in your robots.txt file.
Here are some tips for creating a Google-friendly sitemap to help get your videos included in their index system.
XML Sitemaps
Allow you to specify (video) player and whether you allow play in Google video.
MRSS Feeds as Sitemaps for Google
- Need location of video file
- Video file = same domain
- If you publish an MRSS feed for videos on your site, submit the feed’s URL as a Sitemap.
- Google also supports RSS 2.0 using enclosures tags for video content and thumbnail urls.
A Few Google Rules for Creating Video Site Maps
A video Sitemap should contain only URLs that refer to video content. Video content includes:
- Web pages which embed video,
- URLs to players for video, or
- URLs of raw video content hosted on your site.
- Your robots.txt file must specifically include permission for for User-agent "Googlebot."
- Sitemap files are limited to 10,000 video items
- Can be no larger than 10MB uncompressed;
- An individual video file or thumbnail (specified in the
- You can can submit multiple sitemaps and a sitemap index file; and
- All sitemaps should be submitted to Google via a Google webmaster account.
A Few Pointers
Google bots look to verify that information contained in the Google suggests that you "view your play pages in a browser such as Lynx to make sure Googlebot will be able to find them."
