Sitemaps are an important Search Engine Optimisation tool and Google have recently announced an addition to their sitemap algorithm that allows you to add video and images, plus mobile URL’s and geo information. You can now create a single sitemap that contains all of this information so your visitors can be served the best possible content when they search for you. This is a great addition that will vastly help SEO, because it allows fresh media content to appear along with your search engine results as well as your new content.

For example if you have a page related to a specific product, and you also happen to have a video on the page reviewing this product, adding the video URL to your sitemap will allow Google to pick up the video and include it in Google Video and also on the main search results where related videos for your search term are often shown.

The move to add these new features was provoked after site owners have been challenging Google to add the features since 2005. Since that time, several formats of sitemaps were released, but to make it easier, Google have introduced the feature for you to consolidate all of these files into one. The structure of the sitemaps hasn’t changed vastly from what you are using right now. The additional capability to add URL’s and content types is about all that has changed with the recent additions.

Here is an example of a sitemap that contains references to an image, a video and a standard web search.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
        xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap-image/1.1"
        xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap-video/1.1">
  <url>
   <loc>http://www.domain.com/example-page.html</loc>
    <image:image>
       <image:loc>http://www.domain.com/images/image.jpg</image:loc>
    </image:image>
    <video:video>
    <video:content_loc>http://www.domain.com/videos/videoABC.flv
</video:content_loc>
      <video:title>An example video title</video:title>
    </video>
  </url>
</urlset>

Even despite these changes, the maximum file size of a sitemap remains 10MB with a maximum of 50,000 URL’s in a single file. If you have more, you will have to split it into several files and submit them all. Remember, you can have several sitemaps and then create a sitemap index which you can submit. This file contains all of your larger sitemaps which Google can then index. This saves the effort of submitting them all by including links to them in a single file.

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