A Sitemap is a skeleton of your website in an XML file format. It forms a list that provides information on all the pages, videos, images, and other files that are on your websites. A sitemap is basically made for Google bots who crawl all our websites and index them in their database. Then these bots help to make those pages appear whenever searches are made related to that keyword. Sitemaps help the bot to crawl all the URL address in your websites more efficiently without missing anything behind.
Why do you need a sitemap?
- If your site is large: Having a large website, bots can sometimes leave some pages or content from indexing which will affect your site as those pages will not appear whenever any searches are made based on that page.
- If your site consists of a large archive of content pages and is not properly interlinked: Having isolated and not interlinked sites may cause the bot to overlook some pages so it’s really important to make a sitemap of your website.
- If your site is new: as being a newbie you will not have many external links to your website and will not have proper domain authority, so it’s better to have a sitemap.
- If your site has videos, images, or news: Having such type of content a sitemap is important as Google can take additional information from such URLs.
Why you might not need a sitemap?
- If your site is small: Having a small site means the content is limited and the google bots will easily crawl the website without any difficulty.
- If your site is properly linked internally: Having your all sites well linked to each other then a sitemap may not be needed as the bots can easily crawl all the websites.
- If you don’t have media files: If you don’t want your content to show in search results then you don’t need a sitemap.
How to Generate a sitemap?
A sitemap can be created both manually and automatically. In the manual process, you have to use coding and in the automatic process, you can use websites or WordPress plugins for the generation. Sitemap in the automatic process can be generated from XML Sitemap Generator or you can use the Yoast plugin in your WordPress which will automatically generate your sitemap for you.
You can see your sitemap in two ways: 1. If the site map is automatically generated through the Yoast plugin then domain.com/sitemap_index.xml, 2. If you generate your sitemap through XML Sitemap Generator then domain.com/sitemap.xml. XML Sitemap Generator gives you the option to download a sitemap and then gives you the freedom to customize it and set the things the way you want through coding.
In case you cant Find the Yoast plugin in WordPress or confuse about which one to install Heres an image to help you out.
In case you cant find XML Sitemap Generator here’s an image that will give you an idea about the website.
After creating the sitemap I would l like you to manually take a look at your site through the above URLs which will look something like the image given below.
After generating a sitemap, you can also set the crawl frequency and crawl priority which is possible only through coding, and in automatic both the things are set for you based on the activities on your website. Crawl frequency means directing the Google bots about the number of times the URL address needs to be crawled and Crawl Priority means setting the priority level of each URL as per the updates are made on web pages. It’s best to provide the link of your sitemap in the robots.txt file as the bots first find the robots.txt file or you can simply update your sitemap link on Google Search Console.