Sitemaps in WordPress are like Acceleration to your Car. You want to rank fast, get noticed in the search engines, needs a lot of free organic traffic, then Sitemaps is the tool you should look for.
Sitemaps are based on the original protocol of the project – Sitemaps.org. According to which,
“Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.
“Popularity of a Blog/Website in the major search engines is really very important. It is not an easy task these days to bring a Blog/Website on the top of a page in the relevant searches because of a lot of competition and authority sites. But this job is not impossible too. By following proper On-page and Off-page SEO tactics, you can rank your blog or articles to the very top in the search engines like google, yahoo and bing.
In this tutorial lets learn about a crucial and must concept to boost your Website’s indexing in the search engines.
What is a Sitemap ?
Sitemap the name itself gives you an idea what is this all about. Sitemap is a very well maintained, simple and hierarchical list of all pages of a Blog/Website that is available to all the users or visitors.
In simple words, a sitemap is a very easy way to aware all the major search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo etc. about the existing pages in a Blog/Website. With Sitemap search engines can keep a track on the updated content of the Blog/Website.
Recommended Reading : Boost Your WordPress Blog in 2015
Two popular Sitemaps are XML (Extensible Markup Language) Sitemap & HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) Sitemap. Both are extremely important as far as SEO is concerned.
Why do we need a Sitemap ?
For better crawling of a search engine on a website’s page or URL links, a Website Sitemap plays a crucial role. In normal crawling of a search engine it is not possible to discover all the links, pages. So every administrator uses an effective XML-Sitemap and also offers an HTML Sitemap for its readers.
Website’s Sitemap is important as it provides a Blog/Website a chance to hit the list of search engines. A compelling and efficient Sitemap can rapidly boost the number of visitors and active traffic to a Blog/Website. Sitemap is must for a new Blog/Website, usually a new Blog/Website is a step behind in the SEO and has limited number of backlinks on their website so it becomes a difficult task for the search engines to highlight the content of the website in the search results. Using a Sitemap would resolve the problem to a some extent.
How to Create a Sitemap and Use it ?
If you are using WordPress, then good chances are you have a number of ways and tools to Install plugins to create a sitemap automatically. Before using a Sitemap, you first have to install a WordPress SEO plugin (any of your choice), but we recommend you WordPress SEO by Yoast as we are also using this from a long time and we have found it very easy and valuable and so far the most advanced SEO plugin for WordPress which includes the Xml-Sitemaps as a built-in feature inside it.
- After getting logged in to your Dashboard navigate to SEO tab, In the SEO tab,click on the ‘XML Sitemaps’ link.
- In the new page you will find a check box to enable XML Sitemap functionality, tick the box you will find a lot of sub menus to edit and construct the Sitemap.
To view this website sitemap – click here (generated by this same tool.)
- Below there are many options to modify a Sitemap, but if are not sure of all the settings then leave them and just click on the ‘Save Changes’ link to save the settings. After that your Sitemap is generated and can be accessed by users.
- I will write a complete guide about “How to Use Yoast SEO Plugin in WordPress to the fullest for Maximum SEO. Therefore, just skip to the topic for now.”
If you think you have found anything useful in the post or do have any queries then please submit your views.
Extra Tips:
1. You can also check out Google XML Sitemap plugin for your WordPress Blog/Website.
2. XML-Sitemaps are for Search Engines, whereas HTML Sitemaps are for your Users and Readers to easily navigate your content.
3. Generating or Creating a sitemap is very very important, but until you submit it to the search engines, its of less importance. Almost all search engines provides free tools to submit your sitemap and configure other settings – how you want your website to appear in a particular search engine like google and bing..
The reason why you need to focus on these two is that majority of your blog traffic (>90%) comes from these two search engines. Therefore Focus on the Daddy.
4. You can also create your sitemap online using the tools such as : https://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ but this tool is of not relevance as its manual and you need to create everytime you writes post and has a limited number of posts.
5. Google’s guide to sitemaps : Click here for link
Recommended Reading : How to Install WordPress Plugins
Our Plugins Discovery Section :
- Google Sitemap by BestWebSoft
- Google XML Sitemaps (MostRecommended)
- Kwayy HTML Sitemap (Recommended)
- HTML Page Sitemap