How to Get Your Videos Indexed by Google

Guest post by Keiros.
How to get your videos listed on Google? Have you already noticed while performing a search on Google, those videos thumbnails displayed on the left side of some sites? They are definitely great traffic attractors, and having such a video associated with your site when being on 5th or 6th positions of the search results page may be better in terms of “click-thru-rate” than being on 1st position without it.

There is an additional bonus in having a video associated to your site: on some occasions, Google displays in a block titled “Video results for Keyword“, often on the 3rd or 5th position, several videos, and when it is the case, you can jump several positions and land directly on the first page to join an already existing video results block.

The trick is to find a search argument for which your page is already ranking well but not yet on the first page, with Google displaying a Video Results group on first page: you will benefit from the optimization work of those who made the way to the first page.

Found the perfect search request? All you need to do now is to make your video indexed by Google, and that’s the
easiest part !

1. Put a video on your page : I mean a real video, hosted on your site, not on Youtube or DailyMotion. You need a .flv file (or .mpg, .avi, .mp4) and a video plugin that supports this kind of video formats. Jing is perfect to record onscreen action and make nice video tutorials.
2. Create a thumbnail of your video : that’s the thumbnail that Google will display on its search results page, so making a good quality thumbnail out of your video is an important step. Personally, I’ve found that 160×120 gif or jpg works well for that purpose….and they actually don’t need to be extracted from your video. Any image pertinent to the content of your video will make the trick.
3. Create a video sitemap : Video sitemaps are XML files similar to usual sitemaps but using a different
   syntax. See an example below.
4. Submit your video sitemap to Google : Video sitemaps can be submitted in Google Webmaster Tools exactly as a standard sitemap. If you had not yet registered your site in Google Webmaster Tool, that’s the perfect occasion to do it now.

Video Sitemap example

<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.mydomain.com/Formula-One-Race.html</loc>
    <video:video>
      <video:content_loc>http://www.mydomain.com/video/gpmonaco.flv</video:content_loc>
      <video:player_loc allow_embed="yes" autoplay="ap=1">http://www.mydomain.com/player_flv_maxi.swf</video:player_loc>
      <video:thumbnail_loc>http://www.mydomain.com/video/gpmonacothumb.gif</video:thumbnail_loc>
      <video:title>Formula One Race: Grand Prix Monaco 1932</video:title>
      <video:description>Nuvolari victory (Alfa Roméo) in 1932 Monaco Grand Prix </video:description>
      <video:publication_date>2009-12-19</video:publication_date>
      <video:tag>Formula One Race</video:tag>
      <video:tag>Alpha Romeo</video:tag>
      <video:tag>Monaco </video:tag>
      <video:tag>Bugatti</video:tag>
      <video:tag>Nuvolari</video:tag>
      <video:category>Car Race</video:category>
      <video:family_friendly>yes</video:family_friendly>
      <video:duration>120</video:duration>
    </video:video>
</url>
</urlset>

The video-specific XML tags are pretty straightforward, but if you need more detail, you can check this page on Google Webmaster Central: Creating Video Sitemaps. Don’t forget to optimize your video sitemap by inserting your main keywords in the video tags, it will give an additional boost to your ranking if done meaningfully.

Guest author Keiros is an outsourcing and infrastructure management consultant, and a contributor to SEO Chat Forum. You can also write guest posts and share yoru Google tips with our readers.