have a bandit day

If you’ve used the big “G” within the last six months, you might have started noticing that video results, particularly from youtube.com, are being incorporated in the SERP.

What does that mean? For SEOs, it means another big stick to beat your competition with. Conversely, it means your competition has a big stick to beat you with.

Creating media and having spiders crawl it (through the use of titles and keyword tags; spiders cannot crawl video!) is a sound strategy ensure your high rankings.

So how do search engines know where my videos are?

Simply create a video sitemap with the urls of your included content! Check out the sample below

<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.example.com/videos/some_video_landing_page.html</loc>
    <video:video>
      <video:content_loc>http://www.site.com/video123.flv</video:content_loc>
      <video:player_loc allow_embed="yes">http://www.site.com/videoplayer.swf?video=123</video:player_loc>
      <video:thumbnail_loc>http://www.example.com/thumbs/123.jpg</video:thumbnail_loc>
      <video:title>Grilling steaks for summer</video:title>
      <video:description>Get perfectly done steaks every time</video:description>
      <video:rating>4.2</video:rating>
      <video:view_count>12345</video:view_count>
      <video:publication_date>2007-11-05T19:20:30+08:00.</video:publication_date>
      <video:tag>steak</video:tag>
      <video:tag>meat</video:tag>
      <video:tag>summer</video:tag>
      <video:category>Grilling</video:category>
      <video:family_friendly>yes</video:family_friendly>
      <video:duration>600</video:duration>
    </video:video>
</url>
</urlset>

Hop on over to the help page for full details.

- bang.