What is a sitemap?
A sitemap is a draft of your website that helps search engines and the Google crawler to find, browse, and index all the content of your website.
They also tell search engines which pages of your website are most important.
There are four main types of sitemaps:
- Normal XML (XML format): This is by far the most common type. It is usually an XML sitemap file that links to different pages on your website.
- Video: It is specifically used to make it easier for Google to find the video content on your page.
- news: Does Google help with finding content on Websites, which are approved for Google News.
- Image: Does Google help find all the images hosted on your website?
Why are sitemaps important?
Search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing use it to find different pages of your website.
"If the pages of your website are properly linked, our web crawlers can usually recognize the majority of your website."
Mit anderen Worten:
You probably don't need a sitemap.
But it definitely won't hurt your SEO efforts.
Therefore, it makes sense to use them and make the "life" of a search engine easier.
There are also some special cases where a sitemap is really useful.
For example, Google largely finds websites via links.
And if your website is brand new and only has a handful of external backlinks, then a sitemap is HUGE if you want to help Google find pages on your website.
Or perhaps you run an e-commerce site with 5 million pages.
If you don't link to an internal link perfectly and have a huge number of external links, it will be difficult for Google to find all these pages.
This is where sitemaps come into play.
Here's how to create one... and optimize it for SEO.
Sitemap Tips & Tricks
Create a sitemap
Your first step is to create a sitemap.
If you Wordpress You can use it with the Yoast SEOCreate a plugin.
The main advantage of using Yoast to create your XML sitemap is the automatic updating (dynamic sitemap).
Whenever you add a new page to your site (whether it's a blog post or an e-commerce product page), a link to the sitemap will be automatically added to your file.
If you don't use Yoast, there are many other plugins for WordPress (such as...). Google XML Sitemaps), which you can use to create a sitemap:
What if you're not using WordPress?
You can use a third-party sitemap generator tool such as xml-sitemaps.com use.
These will output an XML file that you can use.
After creating your file, we recommend manual review.
(Your sitemap is usually located at seite.ch/sitemap.xml. However, this depends on your CMS and the program used to create your file.)
It should display all pages of your website:
If everything looks good, you need to submit your sitemap to Google.
Submit your sitemap to Google
Here's how to send your sitemap login to your Google Search Console account.
Then, in the sidebar, go to «Index» → «Sitemap».
If you have already submitted your file, a list of the "Submitted Sitemaps" will be displayed on this page:
Enter the URL of your sitemap in this field to submit your file.
And click on "Submit".
Once everything is set up, information about your file will be displayed on this page in the "Submitted Sitemaps" section.
Use the sitemap report to identify errors.
Once Google has crawled your file, click on it under "Submitted Sitemaps":
If you see "Sitemap index successfully processed", Google has successfully crawled your file.
You can also click on the small bar chart to access the coverage report for your sitemap:
This report shows you how many URLs Google found in your sitemap… and how many of those pages ended up in the Google index.
Use your sitemap to find indexing problems.
One of the coolest things about using a sitemap is that you can get an estimate here:
- How many pages would you like to index?
- How many pages will be indexed?
Let's assume, for example, that your sitemap references 5,000 pages.
However, if you look at the Google Search Console, only 2,000 pages on your website are indexed.
That's a sign that something is happening.
It's possible that there's a lot of duplicate content on these 5,000 pages.
Google does not index everything.
Or it could be that the number of pages on your website exceeds your crawling budget.
Adjust your sitemaps and robots.txt files.
It is important that your sitemaps and Robots.txt work together.
Mit anderen Worten:
If you edit a page in robots.txt or use the "noindex" tag on a page, you do not want it to appear in your sitemap.
Otherwise, you will send mixed messages to Google.
Your sitemap says: "This page is important enough to be included in our sitemap." However, if Googlebot lands on the page, it will be blocked.
More Pro Sitemap tips
Divide into smaller parts:
Sitemaps have a limit of 50,000 URLs.
Therefore, if you are running a website with many pages, Google recommends splitting your sitemap file into several smaller ones.
Be careful with dates: URLs in your sitemap have a last modified date.
I recommend changing this data ONLY if you are making significant changes to your page (or adding new content to your page).
Otherwise, Google warns that updating dates on pages that have not changed may be considered a spam tactic.
Don't sweat video sitemaps:
The video schema has largely replaced the need for a video file. A video file certainly doesn't hurt your page's ability to display a rich video snippet, but it's usually not worth the effort.
Keep under 50 MB:
Google and Bing both allow sitemaps up to 50 MB in size. As long as yours is under 50 MB, you're good.
HTML sitemaps:
This is essentially an XML file… but for users.
You don't necessarily need these, as Google and other search engines now rely on your XML file.
If you believe they are useful to human visitors, a HTML-Sitemap probably won't negatively impact your SEO efforts.
Questions or uncertainties regarding sitemaps? XML sitemaps? HTML sitemaps?
We are happy to help with the indexing of your websites and the creation of a clear site overview for Google.
