What is a Sitemap? (Plus, Why and How to Create One).

Many benefits come with maps. A treasure map shows us how to become rich. Topographical maps can be touch-friendly. The world map reminds of cats ruling.

Sitemaps may be less appealing to you. Website sitemaps can be difficult to understand, and they aren’t exactly fun. If you understand them, they can lead to better ranking and more website traffic.

In this post, I will explain what a sitemap looks like, why it might be necessary, and how you can create one.

Table of Contents

• 
  What’s a sitemap?
• 
  Sitemap benefits
• 
  Do You Need a Sitemap?
• 
  Sitemaps
• 
  How do you create a sitemap

What is a sitemap?

Sitemaps are files that list all pages on your website. It is designed to assist search engines in understanding your website and help them locate particular pages. Sitemaps are another tool that helps users navigate your website. We’ll discuss them later.

Here is an example sitemap.

Warning: Although it will look intimidating at first, it won’t seem so frightening by the end.

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Understanding how search engines work is essential to understand the importance sitemaps in . Particularly, you need to understand what the terms “crawl”, “index”, and “seo” mean.

• Google has spiders or bots that scan the web constantly and index web pages. This is crawling.
• The bots categorize and store every page they find in Google’s massive index. This is called Indexing.
• Google doesn’t scan the whole web in real-time when you search for something on Google. It is instead searching its organized index which is why it can pull up results in fractions of a second.

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This means that if your page is difficult to crawl, it might not be included in Google’s search index. If it isn’t in Google’s search index, it won’t appear in a Google Search. Sitemaps are a great way to do this.

Sitemaps have many benefits

Google understands your site better and can crawl it more easily. This will allow you to rank higher for your target keywords and drive more traffic to your site. Let’s take a closer look at the benefits of a sitemap.

Your pages will be crawled faster and indexed more quickly

Google cannot crawl all of the internet daily. Google has multiple crawl “schedules”, each for different websites, and different content types. This means that it may take Google days, weeks or even months to find new pages on your website. Sitemaps are a great way for Google to quickly index and discover new pages.

Keep high-value pages performing well

Did you ever make a site update to your evergreen content , but not see the changes in the SERP? Google hasn’t crawled this page since you made it public. You can make sure that your users see the most recent version of your highest-value and/or frequently updated pages by optimizing crawling and indexing.

Search bots can help you locate missing pages

Google’s bots discover pages on your website much like visitors. They do this by following links on pages it is crawling. This is why Internal Linking is so important. Google can’t reach orphan pages if they don’t have any links to them. Google can index these pages more easily if they are included in your sitemap.

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Help Google discern duplicate pages

A business website may have multiple pages that are identical or very close to duplicate. For example, you might have two product pages on an ecommerce website. These pages could be different colors. Google may not be able to determine which version of a page you wish to rank. You can show Google which version of a page is the primary one by using canonical tags in a sitemap.

Do I need a sitemap to do my job?

Google generally does a good job of finding pages on the internet. However, a sitemap can help improve SEO for certain sites more than others. A sitemap is required if you:

• A large site (500+ pages) is available. Google’s crawlers may overlook pages that have been updated or added to thousands of pages.
• Your internal linking is not working. There are many orphan pages.
• Your website is either new or lacking backlinks. Web crawlers find website pages by following links between sites.
• You have lots of rich media. Videos, images, and news pages can be included in search results.

Different types of sitemaps

Sitemaps can be of two types. HTML sitemaps are hypertext markup language (geared for humans) and XML websitemaps (extensible Markup Language, geared to bots).

HTML sitemaps

An HTML sitemap is a page on your website that visitors can see. It contains a list with clickable links to all pages of your site. Although this is an old way to create a sitemap it’s still useful, especially for large websites.

Google encourages HTML Sitemaps, because a hierarchical listing of links can help Google understand what is most important and index accordingly.

Here is an HTML sitemap from homedepot.com.

Sitemaps in XML

A XML websitemap is a file that lists all URLs on your site. You can usually find any site’s sitemap by going to: domainname.com/sitemap.xml, but you can change it for site protection purposes. Although you can view a site’s XML websitemap, it is not intended to be a navigational tool for visitors. They are meant for search engines only.

This is how our XML sitemap looks.

XML sitemaps let you use tags to provide information about URLs within it. For example, date last modified. Sitemap extensions can be used to provide information about video, images, and news articles.

Sitemaps.org offers a useful list of XML tag descriptions here.

Sitemaps of other types

You should also be aware of other types of sitemaps:

• RSS feeds News sites and blogs that publish multiple articles per day can submit an RSS, Media RSS (media RSS), or Atom 1.0 feed URL as their sitemap URL. It is important to remember that these sitemaps only contain information about recent URLs.
• Sitemaps with HTML Text:This sitemap is suitable for smaller websites that have fewer pages.

How to make a sitemap

The tools we have make it easy to create a sitemap. You will need to create your sitemap and compare it with best practices before you submit it to Google. Here are the steps:

1. To create your sitemap, use a sitemap generator

Sitemap generators can be described as plugins or software that allow you to create sitemaps without the need for code. These are the top sitemap generators:

• YoastThis free WordPress plugin will create a sitemap.
• WordPress 5.5.5: If you are using WordPress 5.5 or later you don’t require any external plugins to create sitemaps. Here’s how to check your WordPress version.
• HTMLML-Sitemaps.com This tool has both paid and unpaid packages. Simply enter your site URL in the search box and click the “Start” button.
• The Screaming Frog:Create XML Sitemaps and Image XML Sitemaps with Advanced Configurations like “last modified” tags.
• The Visual sitemap planner is part of a larger web planning service. It allows you to create vector, XML, and text sitemaps. Although it is paid, you can get a 30-day free trial.
• Dynomapper A paid visual sitemap creator that offers a free trial.

2. Use sitemap best practices

Google offers extensive sitemap best practices in. But here are some guidelines to help you get started.

• Split large sitemaps into multiple files and submit a index file. This is similar to a sitemap for your sitemaps.
• Only list your canonical URLs. Do not list duplicate pages or near-duplicate URLs. Use the rel=canonical tag to indicate the versions that you are interested in.
• UTF-8 encodes. Sitemap files cannot contain ASCII characters. This means that they can only contain numbers 0-9, English letters, A-Z and some other special characters. Escape codes can be used to replace characters like the ampersand, quotation marks or greater/less than.
• Priority tags are not important. Priority tags can be used in your sitemap to indicate pages that are most important to each other (e.g. assigning values between 0.1 and 1.0). However, these are just preferences. Google will index and crawl pages according to its own rules at the end of each day.
• Never list your NoIndex URLs. Sitemaps are for telling Google which URLs it should crawl and index, and not which ones it should ignore.

3. Send your sitemap to Google

There are several ways to submit your sitemap to Google once you have created it.

1. Google Search Console. This is the easiest way to submit a sitemap. After you have logged into Google Search Console, locate sitemaps in panel to the left.

   Next, add your sitemap URL. Hit submit. It’s easy.

2. The ping tool.

   By typing the following, you can send a request directly from your browser:

   https://www.google.com/ping?sitemap=https://yourwebsite.com/sitemap

3. Robots.txt: Submit a sitemap to your robots.txt.
4. WebSub. WebSub is recommended for sitemaps that use an RSS feed.

The spot is marked by X(ML).

It doesn’t matter if your sitemap isn’t Google-approved, but it can be a benefit if you have one. It should only fit the bill if your site is large and not because of any backlink building. Keep in mind that Google doesn’t have to follow a sitemap. It is more of a preference and guideline that it can use in its indexing and crawling efforts.

It’s easy to create a sitemap and it doesn’t take much technical knowledge. Get started today!

The post What is a Sitemap? WordStream’s first post, “What Is a Sitemap?” (Plus Why and How to Create One), appeared first on WordStream.