How to Add Video Content in Sitemap and Make Your Video Indexable?

Sitemap is a list of the pages on your website. Sitemap is the best way to tell Google and other search engines like Bing about pages on your site search engines might not otherwise discover. Sitemaps that we normally submit to search engines are in XML format. HTML Sitemaps normally used in websites to give the readers an idea about the pages or posts in your websites.
We have already discussed about how to create XML as well as HTML Sitemaps for your blogs and websites. See below the links

You can include multiple types of content information in your Sitemaps. Sitemaps to provide Google with metadata about specific types of content on your site, including video, images, mobile, News, software source code, and geographical (KML).

Adding Video content in Sitemaps

When you submit a Sitemap to Google that includes video information in a supported format (your Sitemap file must be UTF-8 encoded), Google indexes the video URLs searchable on Google Video. In the search result, if your video is indexed by the search engine, a thumbnail image of your video content and information contained in your Sitemap will be displayed.
When you include a video in Sitemap you need to include the following information.

  1. Title
  2. Description
  3. Playpage URL
  4. Thumbnail URL
  5. Raw video URL or URL to Flash video player.

Without these above information chances of video getting indexed by Google will be minimal.
See below the example video Sitemap entry.

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<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
        xmlns:video="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-video/1.1">
   <url>
     <loc>http://www.yoursite.com/videos/example.html</loc>
     <video:video>
       <video:content_loc>http://www.yoursite.com/videoexample123.flv</video:content_loc>
       <video:player_loc allow_embed="yes" autoplay="ap=1">http://www.yoursite.com/videoplayer.swf?video=123</video:player_loc>
       <video:thumbnail_loc>http://www.yoursite.com/thumbnails/example123.jpg</video:thumbnail_loc>
       <video:title>Video Sitemap How to Video</video:title>
       <video:description>How to add video in Sitemaps</video:description>
 </video:video>
</url>
</urlset>

Supported Video Formats

Google indexes Flash SWF objects and the following video formats: MPG,MPEG,MP4,MOV,WMV,ASF,AVI,RA,RAM,RM,FLV Once you’ve created your Sitemap, you can submit it using Google Webmaster Tools or Bing. Like normal Google Sitemap files there are restriction on how many URLs you can include. Each Sitemap file must have no more than 50,000 entries and a maximum file size is 10MB compressed.

Remember you can submit multiple Sitemaps of same website or blog to search engines like Google and Bing. You can use Sitemap Index file to group multiple files. Read How to use Sitemap index files to group multiple Sitemap files.

You can read more about Sitemap protocol here.

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