Some of you may have taken up the opportunity to put video on your website to create a more modern look and feel and to offer your visitors a better experience when they visit your site. Well tat's a really great idea and I encourage you to make some short videos if you have not already.

But how does google know what the content of your video is and how are google going to index your video to help them provide better and more relevant results for people searching. Enter Video Sitemaps!

I guess most of you will have at least heard about site maps and how useful they are for letting google know about your sites pages. Video sitemap is just the same and can be included in the standard sitemap with the following code (example):

<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
xmlns:video="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-video/1.0">
<url>
<loc>http://www.yoursite.co.uk/videos/your-video-page.html<video:video>
<video:content_loc>http://www.yoursite.co.uk/video-01.flv <video:player_loc allow_embed="yes">http://www.yoursite.co.uk/videoplayer.swf?video=123 </video:player_loc>
<video:title>My Excellent Video</video:title>
<video:thumbnail_loc>http://www.yoursite.co.uk/thumbs/videothumb-01.jpg>
</video:video>
</url>
</urlset>