About SiteMap

A sitemap is part of On page Search Engine Optimisation and its a report which describes the Valuable content of your website like images, media, documents, videos, links, etc and their updation dates. In simple words, we can say that it is a map of a website. By which Google gets to know about your websites/pages/important documents and interconnection or relationships between these Pages by crawling of your websites with the aid of web spider/crawler provided by these Search Engines like Google, Bing. Want to read more about search engines and how SEO works then read this blog.

Do I need a sitemap?

do you really need a sitemap

We can easily understand the concept of the requirement of sitemap with the following instance.

Suppose In a city there are two offices X and Y. Now from both the offices, we have to gather the data. There is a department of office X, which have all pieces of information about their Employees, staffs, Engineers, receptionist, and Peons.

Whereas there is no such any department of office Y as like as X is present.

In this scenario, we can efficiently collect the data of Office X  in very much less time as it will require collecting the data from Y.

According to this instance, the city referred to the Internet, the office referred to as a website.

The Office department is referred to as a sitemap & the Information about the Employees, staff, Engineers, receptionist, and Peons in the department are referred to as pages.

You are the spider/crawler of Search Engine.

So, for those Websites whose sitemap is uploaded over the Internet, Web crawlers are easily able to analyze the data of those websites quickly. 

Google explains a sitemap in its documents as “A sitemap is a space wh ere the user can list the web pages of his website to inform the search engines about the valuable content of your site.”

The sitemap will become essential if

  1. Your Website is Giant.
  2. Your site has enough media con tent (video, images).
  3. Your site is newborn and has fewer backlinks to it.

You might no need of it :

  • Your site is “small”.
  • Your site is compre hensively linked internally.
  • You don’t have many media files.

Construct a sitemap and make it accessible to Google

Construct a sitemap and make it accessible to Google

 A sitemap is an XML file that tells the search engines to your website and its web pages. Numerous types of sitemaps are available Nowadays. It can be the most common XML sitemap for the website in general, and it could be another XML sitemap for the images on the website, another XML sitemap for the videos on the website.

Determine the canonical form of web pages that you want to get crawled by Google.

You can easily generate your sitemap using third party software  for unlimited pages with the below steps:

  1. Go to any XML sitemap generator website and Enter your URL of the Website.
  2. Then you will receive an XML layout pdf download it
  3. Put that XML map in the root domain folder of your website.
  4. Enter Crawl, Enter Sitemaps, Enter ADD/TEST SITEMAP
  5. Write sitemap.xml  and submit your XML site map of the website Successfully.

The key point which one should remember while using a sitemap is that a crawled site doesn’t get checked by Google for a sitemap on regular basis. It only gets checked by Google for the initial time and thereafter you have to ping Google that it has changed.

So You should make an alert to Google about a sitemap only when it’s new or updated.

Conclusion

In this blog, we have read about sitemaps, their importance, types and how to create & submit them to Google. In my next blog, I am going to write about the future of SEO in digital marketing, till then, stay tuned and read our other blogs.

If you want SEO related services then visit Apptians website.

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