Most Internet marketers are well aware of the importance of submitting a sitemap to Google. It can either be submitted using Googles webmaster tools or by using one of the free wordpress plugins which are free and do a great job.
I have recently become aware of the importance of submitting a site map which is specifically built for the videos on my site, “note* it is not necessary if you are embedding a YouTube video as YouTube submit their own site map”.
So why exactly do you need to submit a video sitemap?
Google loves to be pre-informed of what content you are sending to them and if you oblige by sending them the required information they will reward you by giving your content a better ranking in the search engines. If the competition for your particular keyword isn’t horrendous It is not unknown for your video to appear on page one of Google within a few hours, that is how powerful it is.
I have spent a good deal of time trying different video site map tools both paid for and free with differing results, and probably not what you would expect to see. I first took a look at Google Video Site Map which was written by Mark Dulisse and is being pushed by a lot of the top affiliates, the nice thing about this is that it is a wordpress plugin which is great if you are using a wordpress blog to show your video content but useless if you have an html website. It is pretty easy to use once you have filled in the settings for your sitemap page as it simply scans your blog for video extensions e.g MP4 FLV, WMV etc and automaticaly creates an entry and informs google.
Google Video SiteMap sells at $97 and is a pretty good buy if you publish video on yoursite and use wordpress. The one major problem I had with this was that I use Easy Video Player to publish my videos which works by submitting your video to Easy Video Player doing an edit then copying and pasting a javascript code snippet to your page. Unfortunately Mark Dulisse doesn’t tell you that his plugin cant read javascript so it cant build a site map entry for your video.
I wasn’t impressed that he refused to give me a refund for it, even though I told him I only used for all my videos, I personally find it to be very unprofessional. The second method I looked at which is totally free of charge is a script which was written by Dave Wooding and is hosted on his site at Dave Woodings Brilliant Website. Dave has very kindly made it available at no cost and it works great. There is a little more work to do with this method, however i will take you literally 3 minutes to complete once you have set up your site map page.
I cant recommend this Google video sitemap generator enough and the great thing is it works with Easy Video Player. I have seen a huge difference in my post ranking since I started using it.
