A sitemap is a document that contains all the valuable pages, pictures, videos, and files on your site. This will be used by your search engines such as Google and Bing to better crawl your site. You are putting yourself in a better position of being featured in search results and enhancing your performance in terms of SEO by providing search engines with a clear roadmap.
One of the easiest and most effective processes of enhancing search visibility of your website in Australia is creation of a sitemap. Following is a simple description of how sitemaps work and how one can create a sitemap.
Once you have an idea about its structure and the purpose, it becomes easy to create a sitemap. Here's a simple breakdown:
There are two main types:
HTML sitemaps: These are the HTMLs, visible to the user to navigate through your site.
XML sitemaps for search engines: This is search engine-oriented and this is needed to create a sitemap.
Before developing a sitemap, draw your categories, subcategories and pages of your web site. A clean sitemap is caused by a clean structure.
Include a page in your site with all the major sections. Insert the link in your site footer as a matter of convenience.
Take the CMS plugins such as our Sitemap Generator or WordPress, Shopify, or Joomla. In the case that you want to create it manually, make sure that the file is in Google XML sitemap format.
With the help of a text editor, add URL location, priority, and date of modification. The approach applies when you wish to have complete control.
Add pages such as product listing pages, blog pages, categories, and service pages, anything that you may wish to be indexed.
Proper indexing of your XML sitemap can be done by uploading it to Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools.
This is because you update your sitemap whenever you add or remove pages to make them accurate.
Test your sitemap with the help of online tools or Google Search Console and be sure that all URLs are right.
You are able to add more tags that can be used to index multimedia materials in a more effective way by search engines.
Ensure that your robots.txt is set so that the search engines are able to see your sitemap. Set your sitemap where it can have the most impact, the site root.
Where a lot of URLs can be found on your website then you should make several sitemaps and concatenate these sitemaps into a sitemap index file.
If your website is large and has multiple XML sitemap files, consider using a sitemap index file to list and organize them. This can make it more manageable for search engines.
To build and maintain a sitemap is a critical aspect of search engine optimization (SEO). It ensures that search engines can effectively crawl and index your website. Regularly update and review your sitemap to keep it aligned with your website's structure and content.
A sitemap will be useful in most websites. Although search engines are able to find pages based on their internal links, sitemaps are important particularly in terms of:
Large websites
Websites that are regularly updated.
Blogs and websites having minimal backlinks.
Websites that have sophisticated layout such as e-commerce shops.
To have your sitemap successful, use the following guidelines:
Size Limit: One sitemap is not supposed to be over 50MB or 50,000 URLs. With larger sitemaps, it is necessary to divide sitemaps into several files or a sitemap index.
Encoding & Location: Use UTF-8 encoding. To optimize it, make your sitemap be located at the root directory of your site.
Correct URLs: You should always use complete links (absolute URLs).
Example:
Correct - page - https://www.example.com/page.
Incorrect - /page
You can additionally add your sitemap with
To get further instructions, visit the official sitemap instructions of Google.