If You Are Serious About Video Traffic, Create A Video Sitemap For Your Wordpress Blog. Here's How..

Lately I have started seeing more and more video results in Google search... not just the results from video sharing sites but from wordpress blogs.


That's where Video sitemaps come in. It submits your video URLs to Google and there is a good possibility that your videos will be indexed in the search results - and they will drive traffic right into your blog.

Here's what Matt Cutts thinks about Video Sitemaps:


It is not guaranteed that your videos will be included in the search results because Google is still experimenting with this and has yet to come up with standards like normal content sitemaps.

I have searched a lot and the only wordpress plugin (free) that offers video sitemaps is the FLV Embed Plugin - FLV Embed

To use video sitemaps, you should host the videos on your own. You cannot use the embed code from video sharing sites like YouTube. I use amazon s3 for video hosting because it is cheap and loads media faster than my shared hosting account.

What I did was install the FLV embed plugin, converted my mp4 video into FLV by uploading and downloading from blip.tv (best conversion to FLV!) and then hosted it to amazon s3 bucket and embedded it in my post.

The plugin automatically generates the video sitemaps and updates it whenever a new video is published.

You can have a look at my video sitemap here : http://bikeadvice.in/videofeed.xml

I have submitted to my Google webmaster tools and it shows a tick mark that the feed is accepted and shows me that 4 URLs have been submitted.



My videos haven't come in the search results yet but I will update this thread once it comes up. I am not sure when. Because Google is still experimenting with Video sitemaps as some blogs state it.

And if you are wondering how Google is going to index the videos with the kind of relevancy that text content enjoys... read this quote: (Not sure who said it, but I think it should be someone from Google.)

"Whether or not free-411 is a profitable business unto itself is yet to be seen. I myself am somewhat skeptical. The reason we really did it is because we need to build a great speech-to-text model ... that we can use for all kinds of different things, including video search."

Hope my post was useful!

So build your sitemap for videos and be ready for Google's new technology in search.

Regards,
Deepak