Video sitemaps contain metadata about each video you have on your site, helping Google to accurately present these videos in search results.
The data you place into the video sitemap must match the actual content of the video for Google to use it.
Video sitemap metadata includes things like the length of the video, a title, and a short description of the video content.
Now, if you use a video sitemap, your videos can appear higher in Google and also appear in Google Video, a dedicated video section of the main Google search engine.
This will help boost your SEO, bring traffic to your site, and get your videos noticed by more people.
There are plugins that are for sale that can do this, but they all fail when it comes to YouTube videos.
That’s where the traffic is, so rather than waste time, energy, and money on these plugins, I’m going to show you how to do this all for free.
How to Create a Video Sitemap
In this post and video, I’m going to show you how you can set this up on your own WordPress site without needing to spend any money.
Now, a couple of points.
It’s a little bit of a tricky thing to articulate because different people will have different amounts of knowledge.
For some people, it may be completely alien.
For others, you may have certain parts of the puzzle, but not them all.
So bear with me if the stuff that I explain seems rudimentary, but I think it’s important to cover all the bases.
Next, this is something that is a bit techie to show you. You are going to need to have access to your website’s cPanel.
We’re doing WordPress here, a cPanel, so make sure that you have access to your cPanel and just follow along.
It’s really important, whenever you publish new content on your website, that that content gets indexed as soon as possible and, therefore, can be found by Google if somebody types in a related phrase.
The Pre Set Up
Now the first thing you’ll need to do, if you haven’t done so already, is you will need to create a regular sitemap.
You can get the Yoast SEO plugin here.
You’ll need that plugin to do that.
XML File
You’ll also need an XML file.
Now, it looks like a lot of gobbledygook code, but don’t worry.
What I stress that you don’t do is don’t change the file name. Okay?
Just leave it as videositemap.
Don’t change anything.
Video Sitemap Tutorial
Now, you might be thinking to yourself, “This is all great, but what is the point of all of this stuff?”
Well, basically it allows Google to more accurately read our website and the videos in question.
There is a stronger chance that your videos will appear higher in Google and there is a much stronger chance that they would appear higher in the Google Videos section.
Now it doesn’t happen overnight.
It’s not a miracle.
It doesn’t work for every single video.
It doesn’t just magically rank your stuff, but it does help.
Over time, this gets more traffic to your content, which is what everybody wants.
I know there’s a little bit of a technical process to the above so what I’m also going to do is i’m going to provide a PDF with step-by-step instructions.
I’ll also include the raw XML file thing that you can actually upload to your cPanel as well so that if you prefer to read it and you want to just see this stuff written down, there’ll be a link below and you can grab that if you want it.
Other than that, I know it’s a techie video and I’m not really a techie person myself.
It stresses me out, probably stress you out as well.
But it’s one of those things, once you’ve done it, all you need to do every time you publish a brand new post on your site that has a video on it, you just open up your cPanel, come to this section, and then just basically take a previous one and switch out the URL, the video code, the thumbnail, and the time, and you hit save and you’ll be done.
I’m sure you’re not going to be doing this every single day.
You might do this once a week, for example.
But the below guide will show you how to set up the video sitemap easily.
Grab your PDF with step-by-step instructions
I do know about submitting sitemaps in google search console but never knew about video sitemaps. Will need to read this post a few times to understand fully. Cheers!
Thanks Sudhir.