Here’s some exciting news for video content creators… Google has launched Video Sitemaps, a tool that allows webmasters to submit video content into the Google search engine(s) more effectively. We’ll be implementing this as a core functionality in the SilverDock application servers shortly.

Why is this exciting? Today, the video-web is similar to the text-web back in the mid-1990’s. There’s a lot of content, but you can’t find it if you don’t know where to look. First directories (like Yahoo) and then spider-based search engines (like Alta-Vista and, later, Google) were a key new tool that “tamed” the Internet.

Video content is exploding in quantity and quality — and has been since 2006. Video search engines have started to catch up, but general search engines (like Google) are still way behind the curve. Google’s Video Sitemaps is an exciting announcement because it heralds another step in the video-awareness of general search engines. Google and other general search engines are beginning to make sense of the video-web. And when they figure out how to make sense of the video-web, it will be a whole lot easier for you and me to make sense of it too.

What does this mean for e-commerce? The race for video-SEO and video-SEM traffic (that is, “video search engine optimization” and “video search engine marketing” traffic) is beginning. It’s time to consider how video content (including viral video) can help increase your site’s PageRank, search relevancy, and traffic. If you’ve already got video content, it’s time to start figuring out how to monetize it by getting your videos listed in all of the video destination sites, video search engines, and general-purpose search engines.

Watch this space for updates as SilverDock announces our new technologies and services to help e-commerce retailers and product marketers use video SEO and video SEM to increase their traffic.

Filed under: ecommerce, effective online video, marketing, online retail, strategy, video