Since June 2010, Google has been running articles on how videos can be made search friendly. Every video that you include in your website has a probability of ranking at the top of the Google SERP. Google Videos is the largest video search property on the Web and one of Google’s fastest growing search properties worldwide. One of the greatest benefits to Google Videos is the potential exposure to these millions of users.

Google has addressed some of the most common problems found when crawling and indexing video content.

Google Video Best Practices are as follows:

• Best Practice 1: Verify your video URLs are crawlable: check your robots.txt

• Best Practice 2: Tell us what countries the video may be played in

• Best Practice 3: Indicate clearly when videos are removed — protect the user experience

Listed below are the best practices that will increase the likelihood that your videos will be returned in search results:

• Submit a Video Sitemap or mRSS feed to Google

• Mark up your content for Facebook Share or RDFa

• Tell Google when you remove videos from your site

• Create high-quality thumbnail images

• JavaScript and Flash

• Create a great user experience

Some of you, or your clients or colleagues, may be new to online video publishing. To make it easier for everyone to understand video indexing and Video Sitemaps, Google has created a video, narrated by Nelson Lee, Video Search Product Manager, that explains everything in basic terms:

Get Started with Video Sitemaps with Google Webmaster Video Sitemaps.

Discovery Channel Case Study by Google:

Since 2005, Discovery has also been putting short-form video content online: a mix of on-air highlights, behind-the-scenes clips, short-form webisodes and daily news features. But 2008 was the year when online video really took off for Discovery. That year they reinvented their online video experience and started working with Google Video Sitemaps.

Read more about how Google video sitemaps has given Discovery users a great experience.