When we talk about the ranking of any website then an XML sitemap plays an important role in achieving this goal. When you apply this to your website then it will help Google or another search engine to understand your site structure by crawling.
We had already discussed in another blog about sitemap which refers to URL inclusion protocols. Google uses the sitemap as a guide which is available on your website. But it doesn’t decide the indexing of every page listed by you on the sitemap.
The sitemap created on your website contains information on every page when it was created or modified. This will help your website to speed up the process of indexing.
But XML sitemap not only tells the search engine about the URL that they indexed or crawled. Besides this, it also provides you with many other information or updates on your website.
XML is different from HTML sitemap as XML is only used for site mapping the search engines. As well as HTML refers to the webpage of your website which contains links. These links help your visitors to navigate the most important web pages of your website.
What Is XML Sitemap?
XML sitemap generally refers to the list of all web pages on your website which been crawled by a search engine. This is not intended to be seen by users.
Search engines depend on bots to find out pages on any website. These bots are pretty fast in crawling but take less time on various web pages on a single website.
XML sitemap on your website is a file that guides the search engine bots on what they want to see on your website. That means you can also decide what content is seen by the search engine crawlers on your site.
Beyond the creation of URL lists, you can also add other useful metadata to your sitemap. It will help search engines to do more indexing your website more.
For indexing, you’ve to submit your XML sitemap to the Google search console or by linking the site on the robot’s text file. If you have a large website, then you need an XML sitemap index page that creates lists for multiple web pages.
Every search engine has its guidelines for creating special XML sitemaps for news, videos, and images. By creating any sitemap, you’ll be included in the rich market of search engines.
Why important?
An XML sitemap is very important for your website because it is the best technique to tell the search engines about your important pages, content, and files. Google uses the XML sitemap for understanding your area of expertise. Also the insights into the updates or changes you do to the website.
Sometimes, there is not any requirement for an XML sitemap or any other sitemap that has a single webpage. Your website can go live with one webpage and you’ll start gaining traffic.
While having only the home page of the website doesn’t make sense for submitting a sitemap of your site to facilitate the URLs of your website.
How To Create XML Sitemap For Your Website?
If your website contains too many web pages then you need to know how to create an XML sitemap. While creating a sitemap just include links to all web pages that you want to show for Google bots.
If you don’t want to crawl any page of your site then don’t try to mention that page in the sitemap. When you do this google or search engine crawlers won’t see that page while indexing your website.
When you use a content management system then there are various tools or plugins available to make or update the XML sitemap.
What Are Its SEO Benefits?
When you include your website in an XML sitemap, one of the important things to keep in mind is that SEO-relevant URLs must include. It will help search engine bots crawl the URLs more significantly.
It also helps you to know how search engines view the quality of your website Search engines like google or others view webpages as per SEO relevancy. This is because they didn’t represent a typical page to their users.
If there are some pages that you never want to show search engines but for users then you can exclude them from the XML sitemap. Sometimes, you don’t remove pages from it then search engines crawl those pages’ URLs that are linked to other pages.
Then it’s very important to also look out for links in the web pages that you’re showing to search engines. So just checkout or only show those pages to search engines that don’t indicate an unwanted webpage. That is not crawled by any search engine except users.
How You Can Submit An XML Sitemap To Google Search Console?
First of all, you require to create your Google Search Console account for doing this. If you have already your account then it’s well in good. After doing this, You’ll find “Sitemaps” under the heading “Index” situated on the left sidebar of Google Search Console.
Just press the “Sitemap” option. After clicking on it, you’ll be redirected to a page where you are able to add a sitemap URL.
Now paste the URL in the column which refers to “Add a new sitemap” and follow submit button. After doing this, you will find that your sitemap gets uploaded to Google.
After uploading, google doesn’t crawl your site instantly. It will take upto few days or maybe a week to crawl. When you start seeing the reports of the sitemap then it will tell you the numbers of URLs that google found by crawling in your sitemap.
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