How to create and use a site map ？

KingswayVideo — Thu, 12 Jun 2025 05:40:20 +0000

How to Create and Submit a Sitemap for Your Independent Website

If your independent website has a large number of product pages, videos, industry news articles, and more—and you want them to be indexed and ranked faster and more effectively by search engines—you can submit a sitemap to help search engines better crawl and index your content. This can boost your site’s visibility and attract more potential visitors.

What Is a Sitemap?
A sitemap is essentially a map of your website that helps search engines find, crawl, and index all your site’s content. It tells search engines which pages are the most important.

XML sitemaps are designed for search engines, not human visitors, and cannot be seen by users browsing your website.

There are four main types of sitemaps:

General XML Sitemap
Video Sitemap
News Sitemap
Image Sitemap
Benefits of a Sitemap for Independent Websites
The larger and more complex a site is, the harder it becomes for both users and search engines to navigate. A sitemap simplifies navigation and brings several benefits:

Better Discoverability: XML sitemaps help search engines find important pages on your site—especially useful for large websites with thousands of pages that may be subject to limited crawl budgets.
Faster Indexing: For newer websites, submitting an XML sitemap helps pages get indexed faster. For sites updating existing content, including these updates in the sitemap helps Google discover changes more quickly.
Improved User Experience: An HTML sitemap allows users to easily find exactly what they’re looking for by displaying your most important pages in one place.
How to Create a Sitemap by Platform
WordPress
Starting with version 5.5, WordPress automatically generates a basic sitemap at:

This updates automatically when pages are published or updated.

For more control and customization, use a plugin like Yoast SEO:

Log into WordPress Dashboard
Go to Plugins > Add New
Search for Yoast SEO
Click Install Now, then Activate
Go to SEO > General > Features and turn on XML Sitemaps
Your sitemap should now be available at:or

You cannot manually choose which pages to include.
To exclude a page:
Go to the page’s SEO (Google) settings tab and turn off “Show this page in search results”
⚠️ This adds a meta tag, but does not remove the URL from the sitemap.noindex

Squarespace
Squarespace automatically generates your sitemap at:
You can exclude a page from search engines in the SEO tab, which also removes it from the sitemap.
Manual sitemap editing is not possible.
Shopify
Shopify auto-generates your sitemap at:
You can't edit the sitemap directly.
For more control, use third-party Shopify apps or external tools.
How to Create a Video Sitemap
If you host many videos and want them indexed as video content, upload them to a private video hosting platform that provides a video sitemap—like Kingsway Video.

All videos uploaded to Kingsway Video are automatically added to a video sitemap.
Submit this sitemap to Google Search Console to help Google quickly index your videos.
Your videos may then appear with dynamic previews in Google search results—boosting click-through rates.
How to Submit a Sitemap to Google

Open Google Search Console Log in to Google Search Console Select your domain property from the dropdown in the upper-left corner
Go to the “Sitemaps” Section In the left-hand sidebar, under Index, click Sitemaps
Submit Your Sitemap Paste the URL of your sitemap or video sitemap into Add a new sitemap Click Submit ✅ You’ll receive a confirmation that your sitemap has been submitted successfully.

📅 Check back after a few hours or days to see if the status updates to Success.

How to Delete and Resubmit a Sitemap
If your website changes or your sitemap has errors, follow these steps:

Log into Google Search Console
Select your website
Go to Index > Sitemaps
In Submitted Sitemaps, click the row of the sitemap to delete
Click the three-dot menu → Remove Sitemap
Confirm deletion in the popup
Google will process your request shortly
XML Sitemap Best Practices
Make sure your sitemap:

Only includes URLs that:
You want indexed
Return a status200 OK
Are fully qualified and absolute (e.g., https://example.com/page)
Are canonical (the preferred version of the URL)
Follows technical standards:
UTF-8 encoding
Under 50MB or 50,000 URLs (use a sitemap index if needed)
Includes the correct namespace (e.g., https://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9)
Contains language/region variants where applicable
Linked from robots.txt file:
This helps search engines find your sitemap faster.

DEV Community: KingswayVideo

How to create and use a site map ？