Google made some big announcements at their IO conference last month around the launch of their new and improved search engine. The new search engine, dubbed "Caffeine," provides 50 percent fresher results, taking into account not only relevant content, but also the different types of content that exists online.

Google used to weigh types of content differently, but now it is all added into their index continually. What does this mean for any business that has a web presence? First, fresh, relevant content is key. Second, the variety of that content is also going to matter more. Lastly, you need to make sure you have a way to tell the search engines what type of content you have and how fresh it is. This is where Sitemaps come into play.

Good SEOs always include a Sitemap.xml file to tell the search engines about the types of pages on their site and how often they are updated. At IO, Google's Matt Cutts said webmasters will also want to start getting their video Sitemaps ready for future updates, indicating that more importance will be placed on different types of content.

There are two ways you can go about creating a video Sitemap. The first option is to create a separate document following the Sitemap Protocol. If you go this route, you will have to continually update your Sitemap every time you add video to your site. Or, you can integrate a Sitemap with your CMS system, so that the fields continuously populate and the Sitemap updates itself. This will require more development work (or partnering with an agency like us), but it can save you a lot of time as your develop your video library. Google announced yesterday that you can also integrate different types of content into one Sitemap, so you can have one document that covers all content.

Does it work? You bet. Within a week of submitting our video sitemap to Google, we started noticing that we were receiving search traffic directly to our video content. And after performing test searches, we noticed our videos in our video production gallery appearing in search results along side YouTube and other video shares.

Now is the time to get ahead of the game. These changes are either happening or about to happen, so if you aren't using video on your website, start creating video content to publish online. If you have some video, continue to build your library and use video Sitemaps to alert search engines about your content.

Google announced last week that they will release a new feature on YouTube that automatically captions YouTube videos. This means that not only will videos be more accessible to people with disabilities, but they can also be translated into other languages based on browser settings. These are two huge barriers for video content that will be overcome once Google starts rolling out the technology to a broader audience. This news also means that video content will be more searchable. Currently, most video SEO is determined by titles, file names, and various tagging. With the new caption system, searchers can achieve richer results by discovering snippets of text that may have been left out of the tags or titles. We're excited to see the captions when they launch, and to see the results they can bring for our clients!