SEO, SiteMaps and Video Site Maps

I need some advice on creating sitemaps and video site maps. So far I’ve used a free site map generator but it limits the number of pages. I’ve yet to find a free video site map generator. Would like to submit my video content on video search engines. Any advice on this and how well these site maps will actually help on building up my SEO rankings?

I see, thank you for that post! What about building a site map with robot.txt, any advice you may provide there? Can I can this auto generated for free?

If you want your video’s content to be indexed (in textual form), you need to produce a transcript manually. Search engines cannot understand video, they do not have the time to listen to an entire broadcast and record and transcribe the audio for you (plus accents would be a major barrier). As such, you’ll need to do the hard work and offer that content as required. Though, in regards to SEO, video’s won’t make a blind bit of difference as their not content-indexable. :slight_smile:

If you’re wanting to rank for your videos, here’s two good articles from the same source which might help:
http://www.huomah.com/Search-Engines/Search-Engine-Optimization/Video-SEO-the-nuts-and-bolts.html
http://www.huomah.com/Search-Engines/Search-Engine-Optimization/Video-Universal-the-SEO-blind-spot.html

So any advice on getting my website better search on search engines? I figure robot.txt would help. =)

Robots.txt isn’t about getting better search positioning, it’s about telling robots what files to ignore and not take notice of. :wink:

Robots.txt and sitemaps have nothing to-do with each other, they have totally different purposes. You can’t use one to build the other, that’s not how it works :slight_smile:

If you’re talking about XML sitemaps (as opposed to HTML sitemaps) then you’ll see no benefit in rankings. The only things that XML sitemaps assist with is canonicalization, crawl and discovery.