What is a Sitemap?
A sitemap serves as a comprehensive outline of your website, facilitating search engines in locating, crawling, and indexing all content present on your site. Additionally, sitemaps indicate to search engines which pages are of greater significance.
Sitemaps are available in extensible markup language (XML) and hypertext markup language (HTML) format.
While sitemaps are typically created for crawling purposes, companies also build sitemaps when they’re planning their website architecture. HTML site map is user-friendly but it is not recommended for indexing.
Therefore, in this article, we focus on XML sitemap. Here’s what an XML sitemap with this information might look like:
And here’s an example of an XML sitemap URL: yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml. This means that your XML sitemap could be located at this URL.
Unlike XML sitemaps, HTML sitemaps are designed primarily for users.
They provide a handy overview of your website’s structure and allow visitors to find specific pages quickly.
Here’s an example of an HTML sitemap:
An HTML sitemap’s URL looks like a regular webpage URL.
Do you need to add a sitemap to Search Console?
Technically, it’s possible to just do nothing and let Google find and discover your site naturally, especially for smaller or medium-sized sites, although it might take a bit longer. In those cases, a sitemap isn’t even necessary.
That said, having a sitemap is always a good idea.
For larger websites, a sitemap becomes more important if you want to prevent issues like unreliable indexing, pages getting dropped from Google’s index, or having some pages completely overlooked.
If your site’s pages are well-linked and easy to navigate, Google can usually find most of them. However, a sitemap can help speed up the crawling process and save on server resources.
How to make Google crawl your website faster?
Firstly, it’s important to understand that Google crawls websites worldwide through its system of data collection bots, also known as Google Bots. These bots will find your website through two methods:
Method 1. Through the referral backlink system
A backlink is just a link that directs users to your site from another site (that’s called an external backlink) or a link that connects one page to another on the same site (which is known as an internal backlink).
When Google bots crawl a website, they also check out the links attached to that site, including any outbound links that aren’t marked as nofollow. So, if your site gets a lot of backlinks from other sites, it can boost your site’s ranking and give Google bots more chances to gather information from your site. To achieve the best results with backlinks for SEO, you must thoroughly understand all their aspects to create and acquire the best backlinks for SEO.
Method 2. Through the website sitemap system
Search engines like Google, Bing, and Yandex offer developers a special tool to get their websites crawled. These tools usually come with an option for website owners to submit their sitemaps, which helps the search engine bots plan when to crawl the data.
Best practices for how to create a sitemap
To create a sitemap for your website, you can create it annually or automatically with sitemap generators.
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Use Built-in Sitemap Generators (Easiest Method)
The main benefit of using Yoast to make your XML sitemap is that it updates automatically (dynamic sitemap).
- Shopify: Shopify automatically generates a sitemap at https://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml. No additional setup is required.
After creating a sitemap, you can use SearchPie SEO & Speed optimize to help you index your website faster on Shopify.
SearchPie is a powerful and user-friendly app that helps improve Google visibility and site speed. Search Pie is available on Shopify app store and you can enhance your Shopify your website’s sitemap and help Google index your site faster.
Firstly, you can explore your site’s presence in search results by understanding how Google views your store, Google Analytics helps you track and evaluate the productivity of your website activities.
With Google Search Console Optimize feature, you can check and fix pages and products’ situations.
Another feature supports you in indexing your sitemap. Normally, the process of manually updating the sitemap is very painful. But with Search Pie, you need to do only some easy steps.
To get started, please go to the Google Index, and click CONNECT to log in to your Google Search Console account.
When you connect Google Search Console successfully, the app helps you submit your sitemap effortlessly in just one click. Wonder if your sitemap has been submitted properly. Here you can see every single public link that the app has submitted to Google in the list as below.
Please notice that, if your link cannot be found by site crawlers, there’s no way it can appear on search engine results.
In case you want to request an index for new pages automatically, we have an auto feature for that. After submitting your sitemap, the manage sitemap tab will appear and you can enable the auto tool.
- WordPress: Install SEO plugins like Yoast SEO or Rank Math, which automatically create and update sitemaps.
First, install the Rank Math SEO plugin if your website doesn’t have it already, and activate it.
Find the plugin with the keyword “rank math” and install Rank Math SEO
After installing Rank Math SEO, go to Rank Math => Sitemap Settings to ensure that the sitemap feature is enabled and customize the sitemap according to your preferences.
- Wix and Squarespace: Both platforms generate and create a sitemap automatically, so you only need to locate the sitemap URL in your site settings.
2. Use Online Sitemap Generators (Manual Method)
- Tools like XML-sitemaps.com or Screaming Frog SEO Spider can create a sitemap for any website.
- Enter your website URL into the tool, download the generated XML file, and save it as sitemap.xml.
- Upload the file to the root directory of your website via FTP or cPanel, ensuring it’s accessible at https://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml.
3. Create a Sitemap Manually (For Advanced Users)
For full control, you can write your own sitemap file in XML format. Below is an example:
Conclusion
Knowing how to create a sitemap for a website is an indispensable skill that can enhance your website’s user experience and visibility in search. Begin building your sitemap now using our specialized sitemap creator to enhance your site’s SEO and user experience.