Should I Focus on Video Schema or a Video Sitemap First
-
Hey all,
I'm working on a website that is soon going to launch a video hub that contains over 500 videos. I'm interested in ensuring that the videos show up on the SERPs page in the highest position possible. I know Google recommends that you have on-page schema for your videos as well as an XML sitemap so they can be indexed for SERP. When I look at schema and the XML video sitemap they seem to communicate very similar kinds of information (Title, Description, Thumbnail, Duration). I'm not sure which one to start with; is it more important to have video schema or a video sitemap?
Additionally, if anyone knows of any good video sitemap generators (free is best, but cheap is okay too) then please let me know. Cursory google searching has just churned up a number of tools that look sketchy.
-
Hi Ajay,
Great question. First off, I think that both a video sitemap and the correct schema optimizations are extremely important in getting your videos to rank. Personally, I would start off with creating a video sitemap and then branch off into utilizing schema. This is just a matter of preference for me because I like to get the foundational elements done first.
In terms of what tools you can use - I know of a few. If your site is in WordPress the Yoast Video SEO plugin has worked well for me in the past. If not, here are some great posts on Video Sitemaps and the best process for creating them.
https://www.distilled.net/blog/video/creating-video-sitemaps-for-each-video-hosting-platform/
https://moz.com/blog/video-sitemap-guide-for-vimeo-and-youtube
Hope that helps!
Serge
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Sitemap
I have a question for the links in a sitemap. Wordpress works with a sitemap that first link to the different kind of pages: pagesitemap.xml categorysitemap.xml productsitemap.xml etc. etc. These links on the first page are clickable. We have a website that also links to the different pages but it's not clickable, just a flat link. Is this an issue?
Technical SEO | | Happy-SEO0 -
Should Sitemaps be placed in the sub folder they reference?
I have a sitemap-index.xml file in the root. I then have several sitemaps linked to from the index in example.com/sitemaps/sitemap1.xml, example.com/sitemaps/sitemap2.xml, etc. I have seen on other sites that for example a sitemap containing blogs where the blogs are located at example.com/blog/blog1/ would be located at example.com/blog/sitemap.xml. Is it necessary to have the sitemap located in the same folder like this? I would like to have all sitemaps in a single sitemap folder for convenience but not if it will confuse search engines. My index count for URLs in some sitemaps has dropped dramatically in Google Webmaster Tools over the past month or so and I'm not sure if this is having an effect. If it matters, I have all sitemap files, including the index, listed in the robots.txt file.
Technical SEO | | Giovatto0 -
Is there a maximum sitemap size?
Hi all, Over the last month we've included all images, videos, etc. into our sitemap and now its loading time is rather high. (http://www.troteclaser.com/sitemap.xml) Is there any maximum sitemap size that is recommended from Google?
Technical SEO | | Troteclaser0 -
URL or sitemap submit to search engines?
Hello, I have just updated content at some URL site links, and I also added new URL content. Should I submit URL or re-create a sitemap then submit it to search engines? And please advise me some tools for submit them?
Technical SEO | | JohnHuynh0 -
Https vs http sitemap
I have a site that does a 301 redirect from http to https I currently have a sitemap auto submitted to google webmaster tools using the http pages. (because i didnt have https before) should I disable that sitemap for http and create one for the https only?
Technical SEO | | puremobile0 -
Schema.org microformatting - itemprop within href tag?
I'm trying to implement microformatting on the site, specifically for the cities where we are active. I'm hoping this will help us rank in local search. This is what I have been doing: op="addressLocality">City Name In Google's Rich Snippets Testing Tool, that yields this: addresslocality = City Name However, I've also done this: City Name In Google's tool, that gave me this: addresslocality text = City Name
Technical SEO | | ufmedia
href = http://www.domain.com/webpage So which is better?0 -
Benefits to having an HTML sitemap?
We are currently migrating our site to a new CMS and in part of this migration I'm getting push-back from my development team regarding the HTML sitemap. We have a very large news site with 10s of thousands of pages. We currently have an HTML sitemap that greatly helps with distributing PR to article pages, but is not geared towards the user. The dev team doesn't see the benefit to recreating the HTML sitemap despite my assurance that we don't want to lose all these internal links since removing 1000s of links could have a negative impact on our Domain Authority. Should I give in and concede the HTML sitemap since we have an XML one? Or am I right that we don't want to get rid of it?
Technical SEO | | BostonWright0 -
Settle an argument re first links from a page? Anyone?
If we accept "the first link from a page to another is the one that transfers anchor text and PR" - does that then apply just the same for internal linking as it does with linking from domain to domain?
Technical SEO | | AidanMcCarthy0
