What Is a Sitemap? How to Create One and Submit It to Google

What is a sitemap? How do you create a sitemap and submit it to Google? This is a question newcomers to SEO cho website tricks often ask. A sitemap is a very important step that guides Google's bot to all the content on a website more quickly. In this article, MONA Media answers “everything” about Sitemap as well as simple ways to create and submit one.

What is a sitemap?

A sitemap is a file that lists the pages and files on a website. The list is arranged as a hierarchy (in decreasing order of importance) that helps search engines:

• Crawl your website more efficiently
• Know which URLs you want to prioritise
• Show smarter results on the search results page

Types of sitemaps

There are 2 main, common types of sitemap, and both benefit SEO:

HTML Sitemap (for website users)

HTML Sitemap is a site map built in HTML that helps users reach the section they are looking for more easily

An HTML sitemap should be placed in the footer so users can find it most easily

XML Sitemap (for search engine bots)

An XML sitemap is created to help search engine bots navigate and collect information on a website more easily and quickly.

Other types of sitemaps

Through these secondary sitemaps, Google can collect data in ways better suited to special types of websites, such as news sites and sites where media is the main content (wedding photography service sites, sites selling images, videos…), …

• Sitemap Index: A set of attached sitemaps, referenced in the robots.txt file
• Sitemap-category.xml: The structure of the categories on the website.
• Sitemap-products.xml: A sitemap for the detail links of the products on the site.
• Sitemap-articles.xml: A sitemap for the detail links of each article on the website.
• Sitemap-tags.xml: A sitemap for the tags on the website.
• Sitemap-video.xml: A sitemap specifically for videos on pages and websites.
• Sitemap-image.xml: A sitemap for image links.

To help you save time building websites with a special structure, Mona Media offers a company website design template plan, 100% optimised for SEO, at a full-scope SEO quote reasonable price.

Why does a website need a sitemap?

For a website to be rated highly by Google and other search engines, it has to be understandable to the crawling bot. This is where a sitemap does its job as a road map that helps search engines discover and index the pages on the site efficiently.

In any SEO guide worth its salt, creating and submitting a sitemap is always stressed as a foundational step in technical optimisation. If you are wondering why your website needs a sitemap and how to use it properly, read the details in the content below.

Why can an HTML sitemap for users benefit SEO?

• It makes the website easier to use, which Google rates highly, because Google has stated that a good user experience has a positive effect on your search rankings.
• On top of that, the extra appearances of main keywords give you more of a competitive edge in rankings

It affects the SEO process

A sitemap affects your website's SEO process. It helps tell Google whether your website meets SEO standards.

Example: You have some articles on your website that are not (or not yet) indexed. In that case, the sitemap is the tool that tells Google about those articles, so Google will index them faster.

Before rolling out a website optimisation strategy, Agency SEO MONA always runs a website audit to check whether the website already has a sitemap. If it does not, the Mona SEO team creates and submits one.

Along with that, MONA also audits and sets up other items such as Robots.txt, creating Schema, Google Business, registering and indexing the business on Google,… so Google recognises the business faster, instead of taking months or years as it did before SEO.

Learn how Sitemap, Audit and Onpage affect a website in the video below!

SEO case study: MONA x Kim Thành

From the start of the partnership, MONA set about optimising the entire Kim Thành website platform, from submitting the sitemap and standardising the technical structure to speeding up page load, laying a solid foundation for SEO. In the highly competitive motorbike parts market in Ho Chi Minh City, MONA did not take a short-term SEO approach. Instead, we analysed the website's current state carefully and built a full-scope SEO strategy combined with SEO AI that fits the business's goals.

Alongside optimising onpage, alt tags and SEO-standard content, the MONA team kept up with Google's new algorithms and applied AI SEO to help the brand stand out on both Google AI Overview and AI search engines.

After a period of implementation, visibility in AI Search rose sharply, organic traffic held steady and website revenue grew by more than 400%. The results show that with the right strategy, AI SEO can help a business pull well ahead. Explore this SEO case study to see how the business broke through in the era of AI search!

Helps Google index new websites faster

A sitemap is very useful for newly launched websites.

These new websites always struggle with indexing because they have too few backlink pointing back to them. A sitemap is very useful for search engine bots crawling your site for indexing, because it tells Google to index your website on your behalf, which benefits your SEO strategy.

Supports user experience when a website has a sitemap

From the user's side, a sitemap helps visitors picture and understand the website's structure more clearly, and access and find the information they need more accurately.

The more detailed the sitemap and the clearer its hierarchy, the better it improves experience and engages users.

Which websites need an XML sitemap?

According to Google, if your website is an ordinary site without too many pages or too much media, and its pages are linked to each other properly, bots can still easily reach every page on it without a sitemap.

However, a sitemap is still one of the criteria that help optimise Technical SEO and in some special cases a sitemap plays a very important role, such as:

• The business's a new website, or a website that already has a lot of content but has not built an internal link system should create an XML sitemap right away to get indexed by Google faster
  See also: Ways to help Google index faster
• An e-commerce website with many large categories and hundreds of subcategories. Creating a sitemap helps bots crawl more efficiently and show product search results more accurately
• If your articles are copied or quoted by many websites then the sitemap can prove to Google that your article is the original, using the information stored in the sitemap

Sometimes the technical errors you cannot see are exactly why your website cannot reach the top of Google. Don't worry, in this video Huy shares common technical errors and how to fix them quickly. Watch the video to optimise your website!

How to view a website's sitemap

You can view a website's sitemap by adding sitemap.xml to the end of the website address.

Example: https://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

If the website returns nothing (the screen differs from site to site), it means you have not created a sitemap file yet.

How to create a sitemap for your website

Submitting sitemaps to Google can be done at any time, but building sitemaps is something you have to plan before you website design, the sitemap structure depends on the type of website, website structure will differ (a basic service website is different from an e-commerce site with many product categories and product types).

It also has a big impact on your SEO tactics later on – so you should get it right from the start to shorten the SEO road (because if you later find the limits of your current sitemaps and want to change them, Google will take time to re-index the new URLs, or if you use Redirect 301 , it will not take effect immediately).

≫ See our: SEO Services in Ho Chi Minh City that you can trust

How to create an HTML sitemap

Creating an HTML sitemap for WordPress

For WordPress websites, the plugin Simple Sitemap is the best solution. Simple Sitemap adds the ability to build and design an HTML sitemap directly with the default editor, easily, quickly and conveniently

Creating an HTML sitemap manually

If you create an HTML sitemap by coding it manually, you can use <ol> or <ul> tags combined with CSS to get exactly the HTML sitemap you want

How to create an XML sitemap

Creating an XML sitemap for a WordPress website

How to create an XML sitemap with Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO is a very popular plugin for optimising SEO on WordPress websites. Yoast SEO offers many tools to make sure a website is fully SEO-optimised, including XML sitemap creation.

Step 1: Install and activate Yoast SEO

You can install Yoast SEO directly from the WordPress plugin directory or download it from https://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-seo/. Then activate Yoast SEO once installation is complete

See also: Detailed guide to installing, configuring and using Yoast SEO

Step 2: Open advanced settings for pages

After activating,

• Select Yoast SEO in the admin menu -> Dashboard
• Select the Features tab -> Advanced setting pages -> switch to Enabled to turn on advanced editing

Step 3: Enable XML Sitemap

After enabling advanced editing:

• Select XML Sitemaps which now appears in the admin menu
• Switch to Enabled to turn on XML Sitemaps.
  Here you can edit the XML sitemap file, such as max entries, which posts should not appear,… If you run an ordinary website with no special requirements, you do not need to change anything.

Step 4: Check

Check the XML sitemap by adding sitemap.xml to the end of your domain. Websites that have created a sitemap successfully with Yoast SEO will show a screen similar to this:

Creating an XML sitemap with the Google XML Sitemaps plugin

Google XML Sitemaps is a well-known plugin dedicated to creating XML sitemaps, used by many people who run an SEO plugin other than Yoast SEO.

Step 1: Install and activate the Google XML Sitemaps plugin

You can install Google XML Sitemaps directly from the WordPress plugin directory or download it from https://wordpress.org/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/. Then activate it once installation is complete.

Step 2: Configure XML Sitemaps

After activating, go to Settings -> select XML Sitemaps and start configuring:

• Sitemap Content: the content to include in the sitemap
  
• Excluded items: Exclude pages, posts or categories you do not want to appear in the sitemap
  
• Priorities: Priority pages you want bots to pay attention to and crawl more often than usual
  
• Change Frequencies: these are default settings you should only change when you have a content plan that needs search engine bots to crawl more often.
  

Step 3: Finish and check

Once configured, check the XML sitemap the plugin has created for your website. The XML sitemap page created by the Google XML Sitemaps plugin looks like this:

Creating an XML sitemap with the online tool XML-Sitemaps.com

The online sitemap generator XML-Sitemaps.com provides an XML file the way you want it, to apply to your website's sitemap

Step 1: Go to the website http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

Step 2: Enter the URL and select Start

You can turn some options on or off before starting:

• Automatically calculate priority
• Include information from the most recent crawl

Step 3: Once processing is finished -> select View Sitemap Details

Step 4: Download the sitemap

Step 5: Upload the XML file Hosting to the website's directory and check it at the URL www.example.com/sitemap.xml

Submit your sitemap to Google

To submit a sitemap to Google, you need to use Google Search Console.

Step 1: Log in to the Google Search Console account that has verified ownership of your website's domain

Step 2: Select Sitemaps -> enter the URL pointing to the sitemap (usually sitemap.xml) -> Submit

Step 3: After you submit, Google will crawl the whole website according to the sitemap

• If no page has errors, it will show a success status
  
• If there are errors during submission, Google Search Console will report the errors it found so you can fix them and resubmit.
  

After a successful submission, the sitemap file helps the website change how bots crawl it to suit it better.

The sitemap file can also automatically update and store information on:

• How often each page is updated
• When pages were last changed
• Important pages that should be crawled often

However, for very important pages or articles that you want Google to index as quickly as possible, submit the URL directly to Google to get into the priority queue.

Google Search Console also offers many other very useful features, such as:

• Checking your website's ranking on Google
• Detailed website traffic statistics

Many businesses invest heavily in content and design but forget a “backbone” part of the website: the sitemap. It is the “road map” that helps Google understand the site structure, know which content matters and prioritise indexing more accurately. A well-optimised sitemap is the foundation for SEO to work effectively and sustainably.

If you are not sure where to start, MONA Media will work with you with full-scope SEO services, combining content, technical work and branding. We do not just get keywords to the top; we also help your website run reliably and create real value for your business.

Why choose MONA Media's SEO services?

• Comprehensive website analysis: Checking the technical structure, optimising load speed, fixing link, image, video and structured data errors.
• In-depth keyword strategy: Researching competitors and building SEO-standard content clusters to raise visibility and conversion.
• Continuous monitoring & optimisation: Monitoring rankings, updating for Google's algorithms and adjusting strategy to hold top positions sustainably.
• Cross-platform optimisation: Making sure the website works well on every device, optimising source code and running costs.
• Building a long-term brand: Combining SEO with multi-channel communication to increase the business's credibility and reach online.

Turn your website into a channel that brings sustainable revenue, not just a place to display information. Contact MONA for advice on SEO strategy full-scope SEO that fits you, and start winning the top of Google today.

Should you split your sitemap?

Why split your sitemap?

Each time there is a new article, we usually add it to the sitemap with the newest at the top, in descending order. When Google reads the sitemap file, it indexes the newest article.

The problem is that if the sitemap has as many as 50,000 links, Google will spend a lot of effort downloading and parsing it. Not to mention that if you submit articles constantly, there is a big risk that Google has to download the sitemap file over and over.

In practice, Google rechecks the sitemap file about once a day or once a week to make sure no link has been missed. Sitemap plugins often bundle thousands of links into a single sitemap.

So splitting your sitemap to speed things up for Google is something you can consider. In practice, splitting sitemaps can save bandwidth and let Google scan them as fast as possible.

How to split a sitemap?

Aim for about 500 links per sitemap if you use sitemap plugins or if they have a sitemap-splitting setting.

You can also split sitemaps by content type: post sitemap, video sitemap, category sitemap, image sitemap,…

Sitemap is always one of the most effective tools supporting your SEO, because it lets Google's bot reach the articles on your website very quickly, even when your internal linking is poorly optimised. Mona Media hopes the article above has given you plenty of useful information on concepts such as what a sitemap is, and guidance on how to create and submit a sitemap simply so you can fill gaps, fix problems and make your website friendlier to both users and search engines. Good luck! If you have any questions about website management, digital marketing, corporate photographyfilming, product PR or services, feel free to contact MONA via HOTLINE 1900 636 648 for a free, detailed consultation!