A sitemap is basically a map of your website and the internet. It serves as a guide to help search engines best understand how your site is organized. Knowledge of sitemap and its importance can play a vital role in your SEO strategies which helps to improve the visibility of a site. It is time now to roll up our sleeves and understand what sitemaps are, why that matters.
What Is a Sitemap?
A sitemap is a file where you can list the web pages of your site to tell Google and other search engines about the organization of your page content, called URLs. Sitemaps fall into two main categories:
1. XML Sitemaps
Sitemaps in XML (Extensible Markup Language) are for more search engines focused. They provide the URLs of a website, along with other data about each URL (when it was last updated,…
2. HTML Sitemaps
This time, I made use of an HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) sitemap. They are a click-able list of pages in your website, generally organized hierarchically and intended to make it easy for users to navigate.
Why Is a Sitemap Important?
1. Enhances Crawl Efficiency
With a sitemap, big search engines like Google or Bing can easily discover and crawl every single page of your website. A sitemap to ensure that such engines can discover all of your content, even if the internal linking on site isn’t perfect. However, this is crucial for huge websites, new websites or those with lots of content in archives.
2. Improves Indexing
A sitemap improves the indexing of your pages, is sort of a roadmap for these spiders. The layout and interlinks of the content within your site are easier for search engines to follow, which means that it may also be more completely indexed.
3. Notifies Search Engines of Changes
You can also add metadata like the periodicity of changes and last update within sitemaps. This information will help search engines determine when to come back and re-crawl & index pages, helping keep the latest content available in searches.
4. SEO for Large Scale Websites
A sitemap can be very useful for big websites with hundreds or thousands of pages. This is important because it ensures that even the most deeply-nested pages on your site are linkable from elsewhere, and to search engines.
5. Helps you Find Orphan Pages
Orphan pages are those which have no links on any page of your website. They can be difficult to find for search engines as well, though if they have backlinks chances go up. By having these pages within the sitemap, you are making sure they will be crawled and indexed.
6. Improves the User Experience
An HTML sitemap is better for User Experience (UX) as it can move users along with the least hassle and provide a structured list of your pages. That is very handy for someone who comes to visit your site looking for something specific or simply trying to learn more about the general organization of it.
XML Sitemaps (including images)
1. Create an XML Sitemap
One XML sitemap can be made using different softwares or plugins, ( OR alson created the one manually). The best approach for most websites is to use a tool or plugin.
Using WordPress Plugins:
Yoast SEO – auto XML sitemap here for your site.
Google XML Sitemaps: It allows you to generate a well-organized Google-indexable sitemap.
Online Sitemap Generators:
XML-Sitemaps. Web-based XML sitemap generator tool to create unlimited free XML sitemaps online.
Screaming Frog: Some cool features whether it is sitemap creation or management.
2. Create an HTML Sitemap
You can make an HTML sitemap manually and add all your site pages in a structured manner. WP Sitemap Page: WordPress users can use the plugin to create an HTML sitemap on autopilot.
3. Search your website Sitemap
Submitting to Google:
Step 1: Sign in to Google Search Console Step 2:(url of google search console)
Choose Property : Choose the property through which you want to manage a website.
Go to Sitemaps: Head over to Index and then click on the button “Sitemaps.”
Submit a Sitemap: Copy and paste the address to your sitemap here, then click Submit.
Submitting to Bing:
Sign in to Bing Webmaster Tools:– Visit: Bing webmaster tools.
Choose Your Property: Select the real estate website property that you wish to take care of.
Under Configure My Site, click on Sitemaps. being the case that
Submit Sitemap: Just enter your sitemap URL and press the “Here” button.
Best Practices for Sitemaps
1. Keep It Up-to-Date
Keep your Sitemap always fresh Any time you add new pages, delete old ones or update existing pages on your website; be sure to reflect this in…
2. Limit the Number of URLs
Sitemap files are broken down into two categories: uncompressed and compressed, with the former still required to be less than 50MB but allowing for up to 65000 URLs. If your site is larger than this limit, you can break it up into multiple sitemap files and use a Sitemap index file to manage those.
3. Use Canonical URLs
Verify that URLs in your sitemap are canonical –they are the versions of pages you want indexed.
4. Avoid Duplicate Content
Avoid Duplicate Content in Your Site Map Don’t auto include pages for search engines to crawl & index.
5. Prioritize Important Pages
PriorityUse priority in your XML sitemap to inform the search engines about which pages are most learnable. This helps the search engine to recognize which pages have more importance.
