What is a Sitemap for SEO? How to Create and Submit One?

What is a Sitemap for SEO? How to Create and Submit?

Today, websites place great importance on SEO (Search Engine Optimization) efforts to rank high in search engines. Sitemaps are an important part of these efforts. Sitemaps are a critical tool that helps search engines better understand, crawl, and index your website. In this article, we will examine in detail what a sitemap is, why it is important, how it is created, and how it is submitted to search engines.

What is a Sitemap?

A sitemap is a file that contains a list of all the pages on a website. Simply put, it is a roadmap of your website. Sitemaps help search engine bots (e.g., Googlebot) crawl and index your website more efficiently. This is especially important for large, complex, or new websites.

Sitemaps are usually created in XML (Extensible Markup Language) format and inform search engines how often the pages on your website are updated, which pages are more important, and the relationships between pages. This information helps search engines better understand your website and rank it more accurately in search results pages.

Why Should You Use a Sitemap?

Sitemaps have many benefits in terms of SEO. Here are the main reasons:

Better Crawling by Search Engines

Sitemaps help search engine bots find all the pages on your website. This is especially important for pages with weak or no internal links. By reporting every URL on your website to search engines, the sitemap ensures that no page is overlooked.

Speeds Up the Indexing Process

If you have launched a new website or made significant changes to your website, the sitemap helps search engines notice these changes more quickly. By submitting the sitemap, you send a signal to search engines to crawl and index your website.

Critical for Large and Complex Websites

Sitemaps are a must for large and complex websites with many pages. On these types of websites, it can be difficult for search engines to find and index all pages. The sitemap provides a clear roadmap for search engines to understand the structure of your website.

Provides an Advantage for New Websites

New websites usually have few external links. In this case, it may take time for search engines to find and index your website. The sitemap speeds up the indexing process by notifying search engines of the existence of your website.

Ability to Specify Page Priority

Sitemaps allow you to inform search engines about the importance of the pages on your website. For example, you can specify that your homepage or important product pages have a higher priority. This helps search engines understand which pages to crawl more frequently.

Ability to Specify Update Frequency

Sitemaps allow you to inform search engines how often the pages on your website are updated. For example, in frequently updated websites such as news sites, this information helps search engines find the most up-to-date content.

How to Create a Sitemap?

There are several different methods for creating a sitemap. Here are the most commonly used methods:

Creating a Sitemap Manually

It is possible to create a sitemap manually for small websites. In this method, you create an XML file using a text editor and add the URL of each page to this file. Here is a simple XML sitemap example:

        <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
        <urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
            <url>
                <loc>https://www.example.com/</loc>
                <lastmod>2023-10-27</lastmod>
                <changefreq>daily</changefreq>
                <priority>1.0</priority>
            </url>
            <url>
                <loc>https://www.example.com/about-us/</loc>
                <lastmod>2023-10-27</lastmod>
                <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
                <priority>0.8</priority>
            </url>
            <url>
                <loc>https://www.example.com/products/</loc>
                <lastmod>2023-10-27</lastmod>
                <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
                <priority>0.8</priority>
            </url>
            <url>
                <loc>https://www.example.com/contact/</loc>
                <lastmod>2023-10-27</lastmod>
                <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
                <priority>0.5</priority>
            </url>
        </urlset>
    

In this example:

• The <loc> tag specifies the URL of the page.
• The <lastmod> tag specifies the last updated date of the page.
• The <changefreq> tag specifies how often the page is updated (daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, never).
• The <priority> tag specifies the importance of the page (a value between 0.0 and 1.0).

Creating a sitemap manually is a time-consuming and error-prone method. Therefore, it makes more sense to use automated tools for larger websites.

Using Sitemap Creation Tools

There are many sitemap creation tools on the market. These tools automatically create a sitemap by crawling your website. Here are some popular sitemap creation tools:

• XML-Sitemaps.com: It is a free and easy-to-use tool. You can automatically create a sitemap by entering your website's URL.
• Screaming Frog SEO Spider: It is a paid SEO tool, but it also has a sitemap creation feature. It allows you to create advanced sitemaps by crawling your website in detail.
• Google Search Console: Google Search Console does not have a sitemap creation feature. However, you can submit the sitemap you created here and track its performance.

Using CMS Plugins

There are many sitemap creation plugins for popular CMS (Content Management System) platforms such as WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal. These plugins automatically crawl the content of your website and create and update a sitemap. Here are some popular CMS plugins:

• WordPress: SEO plugins such as Yoast SEO, Rank Math, All in One SEO Pack have a sitemap creation feature.
• Joomla: Plugins such as OSMap, JSitemap Pro help you create a sitemap.
• Drupal: The XML Sitemap module offers sitemap creation functionality.

How to Submit a Sitemap to Search Engines?

After creating the sitemap, you need to submit it to search engines. Here are the steps to submit a sitemap to Google:

1. Upload the Sitemap to Your Website: Upload the sitemap (e.g., sitemap.xml) to the root directory of your website.
2. Log in to Google Search Console: Log in to Google Search Console (search.google.com) and add your website (if you haven't already).
3. Go to the Sitemaps Section: In Google Search Console, click on the "Sitemaps" option under the "Indexing" section.
4. Enter the Sitemap URL: In the "Add a new sitemap" section, enter the URL of your sitemap (e.g., https://www.example.com/sitemap.xml) and click the "Submit" button.

Google will crawl your sitemap and use it to better understand your website. In Google Search Console, you can get information about the status of your sitemap (e.g., how many URLs have been submitted, how many URLs have been indexed).

Tips for Sitemaps

• Keep it Up-to-Date: Update your sitemap as you make changes to your website. When you add new pages or update existing pages, update your sitemap accordingly.
• Use the Correct Format: Make sure the sitemap is in XML format and has the correct syntax.
• Divide: If you have a lot of pages, you can split your sitemap into multiple files. Each sitemap file can contain a maximum of 50,000 URLs and the file size should not exceed 50 MB. You can collect multiple sitemaps in a sitemap index file.
• Add to robots.txt File: Inform search engines of the location of your sitemap by adding the URL of your sitemap to the robots.txt file. For example: Sitemap: https://www.example.com/sitemap.xml
• Use HTTPS: If your website uses HTTPS, make sure that all URLs in your sitemap also use HTTPS.

Conclusion

Sitemaps are an important tool to improve the SEO performance of your website. By helping search engines better understand, crawl, and index your website, it allows you to rank higher in search results. In this article, we examined in detail what a sitemap is, why it is important, how it is created, and how it is submitted to search engines. By creating a sitemap for your website and submitting it to search engines, you can make a significant contribution to your SEO efforts.