Wanna Get Super-SEOed? Check Out Google’s Video Sitemaps

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In an effort to make life easier for video publishers, Google has put up a guide and case study regarding video sitemaps, which enable creators to index their content with the search engine. Product manager Nelson Lee explained the concept in a YouTube-hosted video that premiered this morning.

Video sitemaps are submitted to Google via Google’s Webmaster Tools. The five elements to include in your video sitemap are as follows: The title, a brief description, the play page URL (where the video can be watched), the thumbnail image’s URL, and where the raw file can be stored.

Lee said during a phone conversation with NewTeeVee that there is no advantage to indexing YouTube content versus content hosted on another site, such as Dailymotion or Blip, despite the fact that Google’s ownership of YouTube. “Search is search,” he said. “We want to help users find the most relevant content.”

While today’s push is new, the actual video sitemaps, according to Lee, have been around since the end of 2007. “We have a lot of people using [them], but we want everyone to be aware that this is the best way to do video discovery,” Lee said. “It’s becoming increasingly important for content owners to worry about being discoverable in order to really connect with their audiences.”

The case study being released focuses on Discovery Channel, whose digital media department began using video sitemaps to index the wide variety of video connected to their programming. “Since we implemented the new design and Video Sitemaps in 2008, we’ve seen a 123% increase in video streams,” Senior Product Development Manager Randy Abramson said in the piece. “And we’ve definitely seen an increase in time consumed per user.”

Related GigaOm Pro Content (subscription required): Why Viacom’s Fight With YouTube Threatens Web Innovation (subscription required)

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