XML Sitemap

An XML sitemap is essentially a road map of your website for search engines. It’s a file that lists all the important pages, videos, and images on your site that you want search engines to find and index. By giving them this map, you help them navigate your site more efficiently. This is especially helpful for new websites or for very large sites that might have thousands of pages.

How Sitemaps Help SEO

Search engines are always crawling the web, but they can only find pages that are linked to. This can take a lot of time. By submitting a sitemap, you give search engines a direct list of all the pages you want them to see, which speeds up the entire crawling process.

What a Sitemap Looks Like

An XML sitemap is a list of URLs that looks something like this:

XML

<urlset xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″>

  <url>

    <loc>https://www.yoursite.com/</loc>

    <lastmod>2024-10-20</lastmod>

  </url>

  <url>

    <loc>https://www.yoursite.com/about</loc>

    <lastmod>2024-08-15</lastmod>

  </url>

</urlset>

Each <url> entry has a <loc> tag, which is the URL of the page, and a <lastmod> tag, which tells search engines when the page was last updated.

Why a Sitemap Is Not a Guarantee

While a sitemap helps, it doesn’t guarantee a page will be indexed. If your page has low-quality content or if it’s a duplicate of another page, search engines might still decide to skip over it. 

How to Submit a Sitemap to Search Engines

To make sure your website gets indexed faster, you need to submit your sitemap to search engine tools like Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. These tools give you valuable insights into which pages are successfully indexed and if there are any issues.

Submitting to Google Search Console

If your website’s content management system doesn’t automatically create a sitemap for you, you can use an online generator to create one. Once you have the sitemap file, you should place it at the root of your site (like yoursite.com/sitemap.xml).

You can then submit the sitemap in your search console account. Once you submit it, Google will fetch the sitemap right away, though it may take some time to crawl and index all the pages.

Submitting to Bing Webmaster Tools

Submitting a sitemap to Bing is very similar to submitting one to Google. You just need to add your site and verify ownership. Once you are verified, you can submit the sitemap URL. Bing will process it and give you similar insights into page indexing and any potential issues.

What to Include in Your Sitemap

• Only include URLs you want to be indexed: You should not include pages that are blocked by robots.txt or have a “noindex” tag.
• Use the canonical version of a page: Avoid including URLs that have sorting or filtering parameters.
• Handle large sites with a sitemap index: If your website has more than 50,000 URLs, you can create multiple sitemaps and list them in a sitemap index file.

Sitemaps for Images and Videos

Images and videos can also be included in a sitemap. Getting your images indexed quickly can help you rank in Google Image Search. You can either include all images on a page within the page’s URL tag or create a separate sitemap just for images.