HOW TO CREATE AND USE A VIDEO SITEMAP

If your website contains videos, you definitely want your visitors to watch them without a hassle. It is for this reason that you need to create Google video sitemaps, which can be done with ease with the help of a website mapping tool. The video sitemap feeds the search engine with crucial metadata about video content on a site. The fact that Google, the search engine giant operates the web’s largest search entity, your video stands a high chance of being discovered by visitors and can attain the highest possible exposure.
Website owners can use video sitemaps to inform Google about crucial details about the video like the title, category, running time, description and target audience for every video uploaded on the site. This way, Google will understand each of the rich video content available on the site, resulting in enhanced listing of the website on video search results based on the keywords.

One important consideration you must bear in mind when uploading videos to your site is to ensure that the format is widely supported. The video details can either be submitted in a separate sitemap or added to the regular sitemap, but the incorporated URLs for the videos can be searched via Google video as well as other search platforms that Google offers. Whenever users access the videos via Google, the video content and accompanying information are presented as thumbnail images, extracted from the sitemap, which is then connected to the hosted settings for playback.

Embedded videos on your website’s pages are automatically detected by the sitemap generator script, which then creates a different sitemap with associated information. The video sources that are supported in the current version include;

• YouTube
• GoogleVideo
• Vimeo 

Furthermore, also supported is the VideoObject Schema markup.

Visit google webmaster tools help pages for more information.

Additional Resources:

Introducing Video Sitemaps
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/12/introducing-video-sitemaps.html

Tag Your TV Shows!
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/03/tag-your-tv-shows.html  

Video Sitemaps: Is your video part of a gallery?
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/09/video-sitemaps-is-your-video-part-of.html

To err is human, Video Sitemap feedback is divine!
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/08/to-err-is-human-video-sitemap-feedback.html

Video Sitemaps: Understanding location tags
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/08/video-sitemaps-understanding-location.html

Video Sitemaps 101: Making your videos searchable
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/07/video-sitemaps-101-making-your-videos.html

Video Sitemaps & mRSS vs. Facebook Share & RDFa
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/12/video-sitemaps-mrss-vs-facebook-share.html

What Is an Image Sitemap?

The metadata about the images available on your site is communicated to Google through the aid of Google image sitemaps. This means that your site’s visitors can simply conduct an image search on Google and get all related data fast. Therefore, the use of Google image extensions in your sitemaps offers the search engine with extra data about the images contained on your site. This makes your images discoverable by Google, some that might have remained hidden through normal crawling like the ones you access via JavaScript forms.

To feed Google with more information about the images on the website, the site owner has to incorporate necessary details into the standard sitemap like the subject matter, image type, caption, geographical location, title, and license. Going through this process is important for it makes it possible for the website owners take note of importance of each image on every page.

Our sitemap generator script will incorporate unique images URLs in sitemap to avoid image duplication for all the pages. The images sitemap is kept in a different xml file.

You can also find out more details here; google webmaster tools help pages.

As much as you might want to spend an afternoon marking up your sitemap with XML scheme manually, some people will definitely not find this an ideal activity for an afternoon, irrespective of the circumstances. It is for this reason that you should consider an image sitemap maker. Things get better because it can be as easy as adding a plugin to your CMS. If you would like that to be done for you, then don’t hesitate to sign up for Dyno Mapper.

Additional Resources:

Adding Images to your Sitemaps
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/adding-images-to-your-sitemaps.html

How HTML Sitemaps are Created and their Importance to Your Website

There are millions of websites in the world, all competing for higher rankings in SERPs. Competition is rife in almost all niches and therefore, you have to be the very best to attract more traffic and ensure that the user experience is above par. It is for this reason that we use HTML sitemaps that basically makes it possible for your site’s visitors to navigate the site with ease.

Simply put, a sitemap is an outline of your website’s navigation in bullet texts. In the outline, the anchor text displayed is connected to the specific referenced page. To make it easier for your site’s visitors to identify any topic they find trick locating through normal website search or navigation through the menus, they can just jump to the sitemap and will be directed the right location. This does not only save them time, but also enables them get the necessary content.

Sitemaps are not restricted to the HTML format because they can also be created in XML then submitted to search engines to ease crawling and make it more effective. Therefore, the use of sitemaps makes it possible for search engines to discover and track each page on your website-plus any URLs that might remain hidden during the normal crawling process by most search engines. Sitemaps are highly recommended for the following;

• Websites that are filled with dynamic content
• New websites without many inbound links
• Sites with lots of poorly linked content that has since been archived.

For a better impression about sitemaps, find an example of a HTML sitemap we created for DYNO Mapper here 

Additional Resources:

View a video by Matt Cutts, the head of Webspam team at Google as he explains why HTML sitemaps are important.

THE HISTORY OF XML SITEMAPS AND THE SITEMAP GENERATOR

The sitemap 0.84 protocol was launched by the search engine giant, Google in 2005. This earlier version was designed to use the XML format. Simply put, a sitemap is how a site is organized, making it easy to identify URLs and the information contained in every section. Initially, sitemaps were mainly aimed at website users but Google’s XML format was primarily designed for search engines, making it possible for them to access data faster and with ease.

The increasing number of sites and their complexities was the motivation behind Google’s new sitemap. As has always been the norm, most business or ecommerce sites contained hundreds or thousands of different products in their catalogues. On the other hand, blogging was fast picking up requiring webmasters to update their content at least once daily. Furthermore, online community platforms such as message boards and forums were picking up popularity. With websites content increasing by day, search engines were finding it tough to track all the content and would sometimes skip some information during website crawling because pages were constantly changing.

This led to the creation of XML protocol that made it possible for search engines to effectively track the URLs and boost their search through the placement of all the information in a single page. The frequency in which a website is updated is also summarized by XML as well as data on when changes were last made.

Unlike common belief therefore, XML sitemaps have never been an SEO tool and therefore has no effect on your website’s ranking even though it helps search engines to accurately rank websites and searches. This is done through the provision of necessary data required by search engines, which is very important since there are millions of websites on the web to dig through. 

The XML protocol was published under the Attribution/Share Alike Creative Commons license, a move that Google aimed at encouraging its adoption by other search engines. This objective was achieved because it didn’t take long for Yahoo and Microsoft to officially through their weight behind the XML protocol that has since been updated to Sitemap 0.9 protocol with joint sponsorship of www.sitemaps.org, a website that is mainly dedicated to covering all information about the protocol. This is plausible especially bearing in mind that there is stiff competition amongst search engines.

The joint recognition of XML protocol is good news to website developers and webmasters; they don’t have to create a variety of sitemaps for each search engine; a single file can be submitted and whenever changes are made to the site, this file can then be updated accordingly. You can now improve and beef up content on your site without much hassle. It gets better-you can have all that done with the aid of a sitemap generator like DYNO Mapper.

Web pages are ranked based on the relevance of the content to specific keywords, which was a bit tricky before HTML because of large number websites and content. Creating content for web pages, blogs and multimedia files is time-consuming, time that would be considered wasted if the same is not indexed by the search engines in time, this is no longer the case. You can now notify all search engines your xml sitemap’s location by inserting an entry into your robots.txt file.

Create sitemaps fast and efficiently with DYNO Mapper, signup for a sitemap generator today.

Additional Resources:

An Update on Sitemaps at Google
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/06/update-on-sitemaps-at-google.html

Research study of Sitemaps
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/04/research-study-of-sitemaps.html

What’s new with Sitemaps
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/01/whats-new-with-sitemaps.html