Sitemap is nothing but contains a list of all pages of your website in XML format that will allow the search engine to index your website’s pages. It will allow the search engine to crawl through your website in a better way.
Why is Sitemap required?
1) First and foremost, it tells the search engine about all the pages that your website contains so that it could provide a link for your url if a user queries from the search engine. If any of your url’s matches with the queries of the user, search engine will index you better.
2) It is nothing but maps that provides a mapping direction to the search engine in the most organized and structured way. It enables search engine to crawl intelligently and gives your website the opportunity to be indexed better.
3) The search engine crawlers have to display the best results to the user in the shortest possible time.The results needs to be the most appropriate. In such cases, search engines look for sitemap that acts as a navigational menu of categories and pages for the entire site. The search engine wouldn’t want to go for sites that will not have map as it will be more time consuming process.
4) It provides the entire content access of your website to the search engine so that if any of the pages are missing from the navigational menus, even they get indexed when found appropriate.
5) Your website becomes more accessible and visible to the users.
Do I need to learn XML to create one?
No, you do not. There are many Sitemap generators available all over the web that generates the sitemap once you enter your website’s url.
How do I create a Sitemap?
Once you have your XML file and the sitemap URL generated, just go to Google Webmaster’s tool and add your URL to it. Google Webmaster will provide you with the meta tag which you will need to paste in your website’s Home page to verify your ownership.
How do I create a Sitemap in WordPress?
If you are using wordpress website, its pretty simpler than ever:
You have WordPress plugins for that the famous one being:
1. Google XML Sitemap
2. WordPress SEO by Yoast
You could opt for any one of them.
However, if you ask me my preference will be for yoast. After all, this plugin has all the features that you required for your website’s seo and not just handling Sitemaps. Just install WordPress SEO by Yoast. Activate them and you will have the Configuration Wizard section under General tab that will configure the site SEO step by step. During the process they will verify your website with Google so that it can be indexed. Alternatively, you can also go Google Search Console (earlier Google Webmaster’s tool) and verify your website through different methods. The popular one is pasting the html code into your website header or footer. We will talk about them in a separate article.
Google XML Sitemaps plugin on the other will also do the same task of generating the XML file for you and its url. After that, it will let you verify your sitemap.
The good thing about both the plugin is that both are automated and does not need to be updated manually.