A sitemap is a listing of all the pages, videos, images and files on your website. This information is used by search engines to index and crawl your site more efficiently.
They’re important to any web site because they help search engines understand how your content is organized. They also make it easier for your content to rank and get discovered by users, which can result in more traffic.
How Do I Create a Sitemap?
A sitemap acts as a roadmap for Google and other search engines to find the important pages on your website. It tells them which pages and what links are important, and it helps search engines identify when new pages or updates to old pages are available.
You can also use sitemaps to show Google that you have updated your pages and to let them know which versions of the page you prefer searchers to see, such as a mobile-friendly version or a different language. It’s best to create your sitemap with a tool that makes it easy to create, share and edit.
Visual Sitemaps
When planning a new website, using a visual sitemap can be an excellent way to visualize the structure of your content before coding. This can save time and resources while helping stakeholders understand how the website is structured, boosting confidence in the design.
It can also provide insights into where your users are spending their time on the site and how they’re interacting with it. This can help you make smart decisions about layout and page hierarchy, and improve your conversion rates.
They can also be useful during the development process, as they allow teams to easily spot any errors and make logical changes that may be necessary later on.
There are several different types of sitemaps, and each one is designed for a specific purpose. However, they all have some things in common.
XML Sitemaps
XML sitemaps are typically optimized for robot consumption, i.e., for search engine bots like Google to read them and index your content. These sitemaps include a series of standardized tags that form an outline of key and value pairs.
For example, a sitemap video entry might specify the video running time, rating and age-appropriateness rating. A news sitemap entry might include the title and publication date of the article.
The file size of your XML sitemap can vary depending on the type of content and complexity of your website, but you should avoid files that are too big to be crawled by search bots. Unless you’re building a very large website, you should aim for an XML sitemap that’s no larger than 50MB in uncompressed file size.
This is to make sure that crawlers don’t have any problems loading it, and it’s also because this file format is easy for search engines to understand.
Regardless of the type of sitemap you choose, it’s vital to keep the information up-to-date and accurate. It’s best to create a new XML sitemap when you add or update any pages on your website, and it’s also good to check the status of your existing one regularly to ensure that it is still working correctly.