How to Create an XML Sitemap for Your Website
Most of us know what a sitemap is – a simple page on your website that contains links to all of the other pages on your website.
But what exactly is an XML sitemap?
While a regular sitemap is created for human users to quickly and easily find site content, an XML sitemap is a version that makes it quick and easy for the search engines to find content. If you’ve noticed that Google isn’t regularly picking up and indexing all of the pages on your site, then XML sitemaps can be one of the quickest and easiest ways to fast track this.
Best of all, creating XML sitemaps is easy – with a range of free tools available on the web to help you do this. One of the best free XML sitemap generators available is from XML-Sitemaps.com. For a small website, up to 500 pages can be scanned and pulled into the sitemap for free. For larger sites, there’s the pro version.
Once the generation of your XML sitemap is complete, you simply need to upload it into the root directory of your website, for example: https://www.dev.admatic.com/sitemap_index.xml
As with the ADMATIC sitemap example above, it’s best practice to create separate sitemaps for your pages, posts, tags and categories – streamlining the process for Google to find and crawl all available content each time it hits your site. If you have multiple XML sitemaps, they should ideally be listed under the one main index sitemap.
If you’re using an SEO savvy Content Management System for your website such as WordPress, then generating the sitemap may be as simple as downloading and installing a plugin like Yoast. Yoast for example, can create multiple XML sitemaps across your pages, posts, tags and categories in a matter of minutes.
If your webmaster is already using Google Search Console to send and receive information from the search engines, then your XML sitemaps can also be submitted under the ‘Sitemaps’ link in the navigation. Google will then be able to notify your webmaster any time there are crawling issues with specific pages on your site.
Want to create XML sitemaps but not sure where to start? Get in touch with ADMATIC today to find out how we can assist with your SEO strategy.
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