A roadmap created to make a website easily crawlable and indexable by search engines is called a “sitemap”. A sitemap is an essential component of a website’s structure. For a well-structured website in terms of SEO work, it must have a sitemap. So, what does a sitemap do?
When search engine bots visit a website’s sitemap, which is created by listing all the pages’ links, they crawl all the links sequentially and add them to their index. Thus, when a user performs a search related to that site, they can see the site’s pages on the search engine. In summary, since a site needs to be indexed to exist on search engines, the sitemap can be considered a tool for indexing.
How to Create a Sitemap? A sitemap, which can be created and controlled by website owners, is essentially an XML file. While a sitemap can be created manually, it can also be created automatically using various tools supported by Google.
When creating a sitemap, it is important to use the correct tags. Here are some XML sitemap tags:
<url>(Mandatory)<url>is the main tag that must be used for each URL. Other tags to be used are written as sub-attributes after this tag.
<loc>(Mandatory)- The page URL is written inside this tag, and the URL must start with the HTTP protocol. The value to be written should be less than 2,048.
<changefreq>(Optional)- This value indicates how frequently the content of the page might change. The values of always, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, and never should be assigned according to the change frequency of the content on the page to be crawled. For example, for pages that are likely to change frequently, use “always,” and for archived pages, use “never.” Since this value serves as a hint rather than a command, it should be remembered that bots will not always crawl pages according to these values.
<lastmod>(Optional)- This value is used to indicate the last date a change was made to a page. It can be used with both time and date or just in YYYY-MM-DD format.
<priority>(Optional)- This tag is used to indicate the importance of URLs within the site to search engines. Based on these values, a certain score is assigned to important URLs, ensuring they are crawled with higher priority. Assigning priority values to all URLs is not a valid practice.
Which Sitemap Generators Does Google Support?
A sitemap can also be created easily and automatically using various tools instead of manually. The important thing here is to use tools that create URLs in a structure supported by Google. Here are some tools you can use to create a sitemap:
- Autositemap
- Neuroticweb.com Sitemap Generator
- SitemapSubmit
- AutoMapIt
- SitemapDoc
- Sitemapspal
- Smart-IT-Consulting Google Sitemaps XML Validator
- XML-Sitemaps Generator
What Are the Types of Sitemaps? Using multiple sitemaps according to the category types within a site prevents URL confusion and ensures that the content is well-categorized. The most important feature of using sitemaps according to categories is to inform Google about the type of content being shared and how it should be categorized. The types of sitemaps that can be used are as follows:
- Image Sitemap
- This type of sitemap is used to index images that Google cannot reach through JavaScript code on sites. Adding an image sitemap separately can be an effective method to appear more easily in Google image searches.
- XML Sitemap
- This is the most frequently used sitemap format. The biggest advantage of an XML sitemap is that it helps index non-HTML data like images, videos, PDFs, etc.
- News Sitemap
- Using a news sitemap ensures that information like the last publication date of the news is successfully communicated to Google. It also informs that the content is in the news category, helping it to be ranked more quickly in news content.
- Video Sitemap
- A video sitemap also informs Google that the content is in video format, helping to achieve better rankings in this category.
- HTML Sitemap
- This type of sitemap is created especially for users. It categorizes the data on the site, allowing users to easily access the data they want within a certain logic.
What Should Be Considered When Creating a Sitemap? For a website that has undergone SEO work and is user-friendly to be perfectly crawled by Google, it must be prepared according to the rules and reported to Google. Additionally, here are a few more points to consider:
- Use UTF-8 encoding and ASCII characters when creating the sitemap. Special characters should not be used.
- It is important to use separate sitemaps for each type.
- Mobile and desktop links should be added to separate sitemaps; if all are to be used in the same sitemap, the “rel=”alternate”” tag should be used.
- The sitemap must be reported to Google once it is prepared.
- The sitemap should be located in the root directory.
- Pages with noindex, duplicates, redirects, filtering, or any 3xx-4xx-5xx errors should not be included in the sitemap.
- Pages blocked by robots.txt, review forms, and all auxiliary pages not designed as landing pages should not be included in the sitemap.
Why Use a Sitemap? For all the work done on the site to be reflected on both the user and Google’s side, the site needs to be visible. The first step to ensuring this visibility is to organize all the site’s data and introduce it to Google in an orderly manner. Sitemaps come into play at this point, making things easier. Therefore, the use of a sitemap is a factor that should not be overlooked by site owners.
