A sitemap is an XML page containing an hierarchical or un-hierarchical list of internal links of your website. These days sitemaps are only generated for search engines, to keep them updated about your website’s content like posts, pages, change in links, newly generated custom post types etc.
This tutorial is about WordPress Video SEO plugin which simply allows you to generate sitemap for the videos in your WordPress site. This helps search engines to better index your videos with metadata. It not only generate the video sitemap but also presents search engines with a featured video image (thumbnail) to show up in the SERP.
What WordPress Video SEO Plugin Does?
- It generates a sitemap for your YouTube videos
- It reduce the time taken by the search engine to index your videos
- It allows search engine to display a thumbnail of the video along with the title and description of the post/page
How To Use WordPress Video SEO Plugin?
Install and activate WordPress Video SEO plugin then visit your admin area dashboard Settings -> WP Video SEO page.
Click ‘Generate Video Sitemap’ button for creating a video sitemap in the root directory of your website.
Make sure to check that “sitemap-video.xml” file has been created.
Making any changes to your existing blog posts and pages updates the sitemap automatically.
Hence, all you need to do is generate the sitemap once and that’s it. The full URL for your website’s video sitemap looks something like this: [www.example.com/sitemap-video.xml] (replacing the example.com with your website’s address)
Google Webmaster Tools users can submit the ‘sitemap-video.xml’ file as sitemap, this enables them to monitor the index status of their website videos.