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Google TV—a Google service that combines video, apps, and TV together in a SmartTV format using the Android Operating System— is already upon us, so the question in everyone's mind is whether or not Google is also increasing its focus on video content indexing. With that said, that's a rather loaded question, because it implies (directly or indirectly) that Google hasn't been focusing enough on indexing video content, which is far from the truth.

Google and Video Content Indexing

Google is the type of company that lives and dies by how comprehensive its search engine is. Acquiring as much web data as it could possibly have is part of the reason why Google rose through the ranks and beat search engine powerhouses like Yahoo (was more of a web directory than a search engine until the company launched its own search engine in 2004), Lycos, MSN Search (which is now active as Bing), and AltaVista (which Yahoo took over back in 2003).

Ergo, finding as many videos as the Google team could possibly handle is also in their best interests. Indexing a multitude of video content has long been one of the main goals of Google. It is part of the search engine giant's long-term goal to be as comprehensive as possible in all fields, indexing video content included. The advent of Google TV isn't the catalyst that will spur Google to concentrate more in finding and indexing videos; video indexing has always been a top priority for the company

Video Sitemaps and SEO

Google is presently looking at sitemaps more and more in order to properly index videos in the most comprehensive way possible. Video publishers take note; the following advice is just what you need in order to make sure that your video content is "discoverable", to say the least. If you have a video site but you lack a video sitemap, one thing you can do to optimize your website for search engines is to include a sitemap. Sitemaps serve as Google's "extra signal" that catches their attention to your site. In particular, sitemaps help Google find and index your site easier as well.

Besides which, because Google is always interested in being comprehensive, a sitemap-optimized site will help them in that regard every time their robots crawl your site. Google will always want to crawl and find all sorts of videos in the entire web. To wit, Google will be putting more emphasis on video sitemaps for the coming years. If you haven't made a sitemap for your video site yet, it's highly recommended that you make one immediately for the sake of SEO.

Tips on Video Sitemap Creation

In terms of creating video sitemaps for SEO, here are a couple of things you should keep in mind. First off, each sitemap must contain only 50,000 video items and should be below 50 megabytes when uncompressed. Moreover, each sitemap should have video content that includes the URLs of raw video content hosted on your site, URLs to players for the video, and the embedded URL. All URLs that lack video content will be ignored by the Googlebot.

In conclusion, Google is always looking for ways to be more comprehensive and give people what they want, and netizens all over the planet want interesting videos readily accessible to them through search engines like Google. Video sitemaps is a great method for Internet users to discover what your website has to offer. If you're a site owner or a publisher, then make a video sitemap to gain more web visibility and higher page ranks in Google.

Check out our Search Engine Optimization Training if you want to learn how to position your website in the top of Google.