If you're creating a website, then one of the important tasks you should do is to create a sitemap for your website and here you'll know why and how
The sitemap is the best way you can tell Google and other search engines about your content in an organized way that will help indexing that content. It can be a link or a code that you share with search engines webmaster tools or add it to your robot.txt file or both.
What is the Sitemap?
A sitemap is a file that has information about the posts, pages, videos, and other content on your site, and where they relate to each other. It is the blueprint of your website that help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc, find, crawl and index all of your website's content automatically.
It's part of the document generators toolkit that you will need when you first create a website. It helps you create the following pages:
- Affiliate Disclaimer page
- Privacy Policy page
- Terms and Conditions page
- About Us page
- Contact Us page
- HTML Sitemap page (for your visitors)
- XML Sitemap page (for search engines)
Why you need to have a sitemap for your website?
1- Visibility
Having a sitemap helps search engines find all your content to crawl, process, and index if meeting their criteria.
2- Prioritization
Google states that there's no guarantee that they will index all your pages and there are many factors affecting the indexing process since there are billions and billions of pages worldwide.
That's why, you should be strategic about the kind of content you want to index and save indexing budget by not indexing the rest of the content.
This is where sitemaps come in handy as they tell search engines that only those pages or links provided are more important and therefor you should only focus on them.
3- Organized website
Sitemaps help with organizing your content in the eyes of your search engines. It gives them your content in categories like posts, pages, products, categories/labels, tags, etc.
This is very helpful for all sites, specially the large ones since they'll be having many pages created.
4- Improves SEO
Having an organized website in the eyes of search engines makes it easy for them not only to see your content and index them, but also better serve online users find their answers or tools quicker.
Related: Check the Website Speed Test Analyzer Tool to check your website loading speed and make adjustments to improve your SEO as well.
Types of Sitemaps
There are two types of sitemaps: HTML and XML.
HTML
The HTML sitemaps guide visitors like our sitemap that we have in the footer. That sitemap is for you to know the content that we have on this site and navigate easier because it's organized as categories and ordered alphabetically.
XML
XML sitemaps guide search engine bots like Google or Bing, to ensure they find all the site's URLs to crawl and index.
The latter type is what we are covering you with today. Using our XML Sitemap Generator Tool, you'll be able in 1 minute to have the XML sitemap that you can use for your website.
If you're looking to have a similar sitemap for your visitors like the
one we have, then you can check the "HTML sitemap page generator tool"
How to generate an XML sitemap for your website?
Simply follow the process below:
- Write down your website URL in the first field
- Click on "generate sitemap"
- A code will be shown in the box below that
- Copy that code and insert it in the domain root folder of your website
- In Blogger, you don't have access to the domain root folder and you still can use the code as shown below:
- Go to "settings" then "Crawlers and indexing"
- Activate the "Enable custom robots.txt"
- Click on custom robots.txt and paste the code into the new window that will popup
- Click save and you're done.
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