Video sitemaps seem to be the talk of the online town at the moment and in particular the use of said sitemaps to improve the chances of Google finding and indexing video content for both locally and third party hosted video.
When it comes to online video you have two options -
Option 1: Submit your videos to a site like YouTube, Vimeo, Metacafe or one of the many others and then post the generated embed code into your own pages.
Option 2: Host the videos on your own server and use your own flash or similar player.
Both options have their good points and bad points but the best choice really comes down to the type of site you run.
For many people YouTube is the best choice offering a cost effective way to get your videos online and exposed to the masses.
Your videos are pretty much gauranteed to get indexed in Google Video and provided you choose your titles and descriptions carefully you will get views of your video.
The biggest downside is that whilst your video will be indexed it will be YouTube that gets the traffic boost as their URL will show in the video search results on Google. This is fine if you just want people to see your video - but what if you actually want to get people to your own site.
With video hosted on your own site this is possible - any video that is indexed will drive traffic straight to your own site. But you will need to make sure that sitemaps are created and updated, pages are optimised for video and so on - basically it's down to you.
Smart-vidEO offers an elegant sulution which essentially delivers a combination of the two - a hosted video solution that makes life easy for the publisher and allows traffic to be driven direct to the publishers site from search results.
The great thing is it requires no technical knowledge on the publishers part - sitemaps are auto generated and updated each time a video is added and a custom page complete with meta tags is provided via the Smart-vidEO interface.
Now there is talk at the moment of Google being keen to educate people on how to generate YouTube friendly sitemaps that will potentially offer publishers the chance to have their URL indexed in Google for YouTube embedded videos.
However this solution, if indeed it is fourthcoming, will still likely fall short of the requirements of many brand conscious publishers who will not want YouTube branding in their videos and will be looking for a more customisable option, albeit with the same potential for organic traffic generation.
Either way the options for publishers are only likely to increase in the coming months and Googles involvement will certainly ensure that everyone has the opportunity to have their videos found.
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