If you’re using video to promote your website (which we strongly recommend), you’re probably using one of these three strategies;

1. Hosting your video content on your own web site to promote your products or services.
2. Hosting your video on 3rd party sites like YouTube to promote your products or service.
3. Hosting your video BOTH on your own site and on sites like YouTube.

While it may make sense to post your content on YouTube to take advantage of the massive traffic that the site offers, you’ll always be challenged with getting those viewers to take some action to get them to your site. However, if your site doesn’t have much traffic to begin with and your content isn’t visible to search engines, hosting it exclusively on your own site might not make the most sense either.

In most situations, it’s worth considering option #3, hosting both on 3rd party sites AND on your own site, giving you the best of both Worlds.

Now if you’re hosting video on your own site, you’ll want to be sure that web visitors are able to find it through Google, Yahoo!, Bing and other search engines. One way to do that is to create and submit a video sitemap or multiple sitemaps.

Video sitemaps are similar in function to regular web sitemaps, except that they tell the search engines that you have video content on your site and you encourage the engines to index those specific pages. If done properly, this can help you get those pages ranked quickly.

Creating and submitting a video sitemap to Google is fairly straightforward, and information about the process is readily available on the web. The nice thing about the Google sitemap is that you only have to submit the feed once, and then when you add videos to it, the feed is automatically updated.   Additionally, unless you have a paid YouTube account, you don’t have much control over the preview image that’s associated with your YouTube video.  With Google sitemaps, you can configure the preview image exactly the way you want it to be displayed in the search results.

Unfortunately, you cannot submit your Google video sitemaps to Yahoo!.  Google uses an .xml formate and Yahoo! uses the MRSS format which was created in 2004.  You’ll have to manually create the file or use software to make the conversion for you.

Admittedly, it does require some extra work to create and submit video sitemaps.  If you’re not convinced that you’ll get return on your effort, consider this: Google has indicated that it’s planning to pay greater attention to video sitemaps in the future.

In an article titled “Google to all Publishers – Get Your Video Sitemaps Ready” Mark Robertson from ReelSEO.com points to a comment made by Matt Cutts at an SMX Advanced conference in Seattle:

“…Video sitemaps are something that we’re probably going to look at a little more closely. If you tell us where your videos are, we will try to index them a little bit harder,” Cutts said. “For example, if you think about things like Google TV, coming out in the fall, it’s in everybody’s interest that all the videos that are on the web be able to be very discoverable and very searchable. If you produce videos and you haven’t done a video site map, that is something that I would definitely recommend.”

Robertson followed-up with Cutts on the comment after the session to clarify his call to publishers to embrace the use of video sitemaps. Cutts responded:

“We want to be able to crawl and find all the video across the entire web, so that we can return them. and so I think we are going to be putting more and more weight on video sitemaps going forward, like this fall and into the future. If you make video, if you are a site owner, or a publisher, please start exploring video sitemaps.”

There you have it, straight from the source.

If you’re creating video content for the purpose of marketing your business online, you should consider taking the extra steps involved to create a video sitemap.

To learn more about using video to promote your business, be sure to check out SEMA’s Online Marketing Conference in Las Vegas on Monday, November 1st, 2010.