22Aug Video Sitemaps
Apologies for still not adding the project I promised (the one that involved prizes) but I’m having some trouble getting Wordpress to display .swf 
files correctly. It works in preview mode, so hopefully I’m nearly there.
These days everybody knows that to help the search engines find your site that you should create a sitemap, listing all of your site’s pages. What some people don’t realise is that with vertical search (types or topics of search, the kind that returns News and Video results into the main index) you can submit a sitemap of your video to webmaster tools which will index it in Google Videos.
These sitemaps allow you to add a title and description as well as a few other details. Being able to title and describe a video is a huge advantage when it comes to letting Google know what your video is about and by extension let users find it.
When writing the description you are limited to 2048 characters (about 300 words) and you should use this space as you would meta description tags. Place relevant keywords in the description as well as writing it so as to encourage viewing.
Videos appear on the front page of Google SERPS all the time now and may be an easy way to gain prominence for selective keywords. Of course make sure the video you are promoting is relevant and not just a random YouTube video you’ve shoved on your site a dozen times with a dozen different descriptions!
Google provides instructions on how to add a video sitemap on their Webmaster Help Centre.
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