When it comes to getting your website ranked, you need to take advantage of as many SEO hacks as possible. Creating a sitemap is one technique that will definitely help improve your SEO strategy.
What is a sitemap?
Some of you may be more familiar with this than others. I’ll give you a quick crash course on the basics of sitemaps before I show you how to build a website sitemap on your own.
Simply put, a sitemap, or XML sitemap, is a list of different pages on a website. XML is short for “extensible markup language,” which is a way to display information on a site.
I’ve consulted with so many website owners who are intimidated by this concept because sitemaps are considered a technical component of SEO. But in all reality, you don’t need to be a tech wizard or have a tech background to create a sitemap. As you’ll learn shortly, it’s really not that difficult.
An easy-to-navigate list of some of PayPal's most visited pages on the site. The SitemapGenie.com sitemap generator will crawl your web site, automatically detect all pages and and generate a sitemap.xml file which you can submit to search engines. Simply input your web site's URL above and click on 'Generate' button. Make sure that your website is publicly accessible and is not password protected. There are two types of sitemap formats, but they can be split into multiple categories, depending on their purpose. First, we have HTML sitemaps and XML sitemaps. HTML sitemaps are basically just web pages containing href tags which link to other pages. They are useful for users when seeking something but also for search engines. A sitemap is an XML file listing all the important content on your website. Any page or file that you want to show up in search engines should be in your sitemap.
Why do you need a sitemap?
Search engines like Google are committed to displaying the most relevant results to people for any given search query. In order do this effectively, they use site crawlers to read, organize, and index information on the Internet.
XML sitemaps make it easier for search engine crawlers to read the content on your site and index the pages accordingly. As a result, this increases your chances of boosting the SEO ranking of your website.
Your sitemap will tell search engines the location of a page on your website, when it was updated, the updating frequency, and the importance of the page as it’s related to other pages on your site. Without a proper sitemap, Google bots might think that your site has duplicate content, which will actually hurt your SEO ranking.
If you’re ready for your website to get indexed faster by search engines, just follow these five easy steps to create a sitemap.
Step 1: Review the structure of your pages
The first thing you need to do is look at the existing content on your website and see how everything is structured.
Look at a sitemap template and figure out how your pages would be displayed on the table.
This is a very basic example that’s easy to follow.
It all starts from the homepage. Then you have to ask yourself where your homepage links to. You likely already have this figured out based on the menu options on your site.
But when it comes to SEO, not all pages are created equal. You have to keep the depth of your website in mind when you’re doing this. Recognize that the pages further away from your site’s homepage will be harder to rank for.
According to Search Engine Journal, you should aim to create a sitemap that has a shallow depth, meaning it only takes three clicks to navigate to any page on your website. That’s much better for SEO purposes.
So you need to create a hierarchy of pages based on importance and how you want them to be indexed. Prioritize your content into tiers that follow a logical hierarchy. Here’s an example to show you what I’m talking about.
As you can see, the About page links to Our Team as well as Mission & Values. Then the Our Team page links to Management and Contact Us.
The About Us page is the most important, which is why it’s part of the top-level navigation. It wouldn’t make sense to have the management page be prioritized at the same level as Products, Pricing, and Blogs, which is why it falls under third-level content.
Similarly, if the Basic pricing package was positioned above the Compare Packages page, it would throw the logical structure out of whack.
So use these visual sitemap templates to determine the organization of your pages. Some of you may already have a structure that makes sense but just needs some slight tweaking.
Remember, you want to try to set it up so every page can be reached in three clicks.
Step 2: Code your URLs
Sitemap Yahoo
Now that you’ve gone through and identified the importance of each page and matched that importance in your site structure, it’s time to code those URLs.
The way to do this is by formatting each URL with XML tags. If you have any experience with HTML coding, this will be a breeze for you. As I said earlier, the “ML” in XML stands for markup language, which is the same for HTML.
Even if this is new to you, it’s not that tough to figure it out. Start by getting a text editor where you can create an XML file.
Sublime Text is a great option for you to consider.
Then add the corresponding code for each URL.
Sitemap Example
- location
- last changed
- changed frequency
- priority of page
Here are some examples of how the code will look for each one.
- http://www.examplesite.com/page1
- 2019-1-10
- weekly
- 2
Take your time and make sure you go through this properly. The text editor makes your life much easier when it comes to adding this code, but it still requires you to be sharp.
Step 3: Validate the code
Any time you code manually, human error is possible. But, for your sitemap to function properly, you can’t have any mistakes in the coding.
Fortunately, there are tools that will help validate your code to ensure the syntax is correct. There’s software available online that can help you do this. Just run a quick Google search for sitemap validation, and you’ll find something.
I like to use the XML Sitemap Validator tool.
This will point out any errors in your code.
For example, if you forget to add an end tag or something like that, it can quickly be identified and fixed.
Step 4: Add your sitemap to the root and robots.txt
Locate the root folder of your website and add the sitemap file to this folder.
Doing this will actually add the page to your site as well. This is not a problem at all. As a matter of fact, lots of websites have this. Just type in a website and add “/sitemap/” to the URL and see what pops up.
Here’s an example from the Apple website.
Notice the structure and logical hierarchy of each section. This relates back to what we discussed in the first step.
Now, this can be taken one step further. You can even look at the code on different websites by adding “/sitemap.xml” to the URL.
Here’s what that looks like on the HubSpot website.
In addition to adding the sitemap file to your root folder, you’ll also want to add it to the robots.txt file. You’ll find this in the roots folder as well.
Basically, this to give instructions for any crawlers indexing your website.
There are a couple of different uses for the robots.txt folder. You can set this up to show search engines URLs that you don’t want them to index when they’re crawling on your site.
Let’s go back to Apple and see what their robots.txt page looks like.
As you can see, they have “disallow” for several pages on their site. So crawlers ignore these.
However, Apple also includes their sitemap files on here as well.
Not everyone you ask will tell you to add your sitemaps to the robots.txt file. So I’ll let you decide that for yourself.
With that said, I’m definitely a firm believer in following the best practices of successful websites and businesses. If a giant like Apple uses this, it can’t be too bad of an idea for you to consider.
Step 5: Submit your sitemap
Now that your sitemap has been created and added to your site files, it’s time to submit them to search engines.
In order to do this, you need to go through Google Search Console. Some of you may already have this set up. If not, you can get started very easily.
Once you’re on the search console dashboard, navigate to Crawl > Sitemaps.
Next, click on Add/Test Sitemap on the top right corner of the screen.
This is a chance for you to test your sitemap again for any errors before you continue. Obviously, you’ll want to fix any mistakes found. Once your sitemap is free of errors, click submit and that’s it. Google will handle everything else from here. Now crawlers will index your site with ease, which will boost your SEO ranking.
Alternative options
While these five steps are pretty simple and straightforward, some of you might be a little uncomfortable manually changing the code on your website. That’s perfectly understandable. Fortunately for you, there are plenty of other solutions that can create a sitemap for you, without having to edit the code yourself.
I’ll go through some of the top options for you to consider.
Yoast plugin
If you have a WordPress website, you can install the Yoast plugin to create a sitemap for your website.
Yoast gives you the option to turn your sitemap on and off with a simple toggle switch. You can find all of your XML sitemap options from the SEO tab via WordPress once the plugin has been installed.
Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog is desktop software that offers a wide range of SEO tools. It’s free to use and generate a sitemap as long as the website has fewer than 500 pages. For those of you with larger websites, you’ll need to upgrade the paid version.
Screaming Frog allows you to make all of the coding changes that we talked about earlier, but without actually changing the code yourself. Instead, you follow a prompt that’s much more user-friendly, and written in plain English. Then the code for the sitemap file will be changed automatically. Here’s a screenshot to show you what I mean.
Just navigate through the tabs, change your settings, and the sitemap file will be adjusted accordingly.
Slickplan
I really like Slickplan because of the visual sitemap builder feature. You’ll have the opportunity to use a sitemap template, similar to the ones we looked at earlier.
From here, you can drag and drop different pages into the template to organize the structure of your website. Once you’re done, and you’re happy with the way your visual sitemap looks, you can export it as an XML file.
Slickplan is paid software, but they offer a free trial. It’s at least worth trying if you’re on the fence about purchasing a plan.
Conclusion
If you’re ready to take your SEO strategy to the next level, you need to create a sitemap for your website.
There is no reason to be intimidated by this anymore. As you can see from this guide, it’s easy to create a sitemap in just five steps.
- Review your pages
- Code the URLs
- Validate your code
- Add the sitemap to the root and robots.txt
- Submit the sitemap
That’s it!
For those of you who are still on the fence about manually changing code on your website, there are other options for you to consider. The Internet is full of sitemap resources, but the Yoast plugin, Screaming Frog, and Slickplan are all great choices to start.
Other Guides That You May Like
Jump to:
XML tag definitions
Entity escaping
Using Sitemap index files
Sitemap file location
Validating your Sitemap
Extending the Sitemaps protocol
Informing search engine crawlers
This document describes the XML schema for the Sitemap protocol.
The Sitemap protocol format consists of XML tags. All data values in a Sitemap must be entity-escaped. The file itself must be UTF-8 encoded.
The Sitemap must:
- Begin with an opening
<urlset>tag and end with a closing</urlset>tag. - Specify the namespace (protocol standard) within the
<urlset>tag. - Include a
<url>entry for each URL, as a parent XML tag. - Include a
<loc>child entry for each<url>parent tag.
All other tags are optional. Support for these optional tags may vary among search engines. Refer to each search engine's documentation for details.
Sample XML Sitemap
The following example shows a Sitemap that contains just one URL and uses all optional tags. The optional tags are in italics.
Also see our example with multiple URLs.
XML tag definitions
The available XML tags are described below.
| Attribute | Description | |
|---|---|---|
<urlset> | required | Encapsulates the file and references the current protocol standard. |
<url> | required | Parent tag for each URL entry. The remaining tags are children of this tag. |
<loc> | required | URL of the page. This URL must begin with the protocol (such as http) and end with a trailing slash, if your web server requires it. This value must be less than 2,048 characters. |
<lastmod> | optional | The date of last modification of the file. This date should be in W3C Datetime format. This format allows you to omit the time portion, if desired, and use YYYY-MM-DD. Note that this tag is separate from the If-Modified-Since (304) header the server can return, and search engines may use the information from both sources differently. |
<changefreq> | optional | How frequently the page is likely to change. This value provides general information to search engines and may not correlate exactly to how often they crawl the page. Valid values are:
The value 'always' should be used to describe documents that change each time they are accessed. The value 'never' should be used to describe archived URLs. Please note that the value of this tag is considered a hint and not a command. Even though search engine crawlers may consider this information when making decisions, they may crawl pages marked 'hourly' less frequently than that, and they may crawl pages marked 'yearly' more frequently than that. Crawlers may periodically crawl pages marked 'never' so that they can handle unexpected changes to those pages. |
<priority> | optional | The priority of this URL relative to other URLs on your site. Valid values range from 0.0 to 1.0. This value does not affect how your pages are compared to pages on other sites—it only lets the search engines know which pages you deem most important for the crawlers. The default priority of a page is 0.5. Please note that the priority you assign to a page is not likely to influence the position of your URLs in a search engine's result pages. Search engines may use this information when selecting between URLs on the same site, so you can use this tag to increase the likelihood that your most important pages are present in a search index. Also, please note that assigning a high priority to all of the URLs on your site is not likely to help you. Since the priority is relative, it is only used to select between URLs on your site. |
Entity escaping
Your Sitemap file must be UTF-8 encoded (you can generally do this when you save the file). As with all XML files, any data values (including URLs) must use entity escape codes for the characters listed in the table below.
| Character | Escape Code | |
|---|---|---|
| Ampersand | & | & |
| Single Quote | ' | ' |
| Double Quote | ' | " |
| Greater Than | > | > |
| Less Than | < | < |
In addition, all URLs (including the URL of your Sitemap) must be URL-escaped and encoded for readability by the web server on which they are located. However, if you are using any sort of script, tool, or log file to generate your URLs (anything except typing them in by hand), this is usually already done for you. Please check to make sure that your URLs follow the RFC-3986 standard for URIs, the RFC-3987 standard for IRIs, and the XML standard.
Below is an example of a URL that uses a non-ASCII character (ü), as well as a character that requires entity escaping (&):
Below is that same URL, ISO-8859-1 encoded (for hosting on a server that uses that encoding) and URL escaped:
Below is that same URL, UTF-8 encoded (for hosting on a server that uses that encoding) and URL escaped:
Below is that same URL, but also entity escaped:
Sample XML Sitemap
The following example shows a Sitemap in XML format. The Sitemap in the example contains a small number of URLs, each using a different set of optional parameters.
Using Sitemap index files (to group multiple sitemap files)
You can provide multiple Sitemap files, but each Sitemap file that you provide must have no more than 50,000 URLs and must be no larger than 10MB (10,485,760 bytes). If you would like, you may compress your Sitemap files using gzip to stay within 10MB and reduce your bandwidth requirement. If you want to list more than 50,000 URLs, you must create multiple Sitemap files.
If you do provide multiple Sitemaps, you should then list each Sitemap file in a Sitemap index file. Sitemap index files may not list more than 1,000 Sitemaps and must be no larger than 10MB (10,485,760 bytes). The XML format of a Sitemap index file is very similar to the XML format of a Sitemap file.
The Sitemap index file must:
- Begin with an opening
<sitemapindex>tag and end with a closing</sitemapindex>tag. - Include a
<sitemap>entry for each Sitemap as a parent XML tag. - Include a
<loc>child entry for each<sitemap>parent tag.
The optional <lastmod> tag is also available for Sitemap index files.
Note: A Sitemap index file can only specify Sitemaps that are found on the same site as the Sitemap index file. For example, http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap_index.xml can include Sitemaps on http://www.yoursite.com but not on http://www.example.com or http://yourhost.yoursite.com. As with Sitemaps, your Sitemap index file must be UTF-8 encoded.
Sample XML Sitemap Index
The following example shows a Sitemap index that lists two Sitemaps:
Note: Sitemap URLs, like all values in your XML files, must be entity escaped.
Sitemap Index XML Tag Definitions
| Attribute | Description | |
|---|---|---|
<sitemapindex> | required | Encapsulates information about all of the Sitemaps in the file. |
<sitemap> | required | Encapsulates information about an individual Sitemap. |
<loc> | required | Identifies the location of the Sitemap. This location can be a Sitemap, an Atom file, RSS file or a simple text file. |
<lastmod> | optional | Identifies the time that the corresponding Sitemap file was modified. It does not correspond to the time that any of the pages listed in that Sitemap were changed. The value for the lastmod tag should be in W3C Datetime format. By providing the last modification timestamp, you enable search engine crawlers to retrieve only a subset of the Sitemaps in the index i.e. a crawler may only retrieve Sitemaps that were modified since a certain date. This incremental Sitemap fetching mechanism allows for the rapid discovery of new URLs on very large sites. |
Sitemap file location
The location of a Sitemap file determines the set of URLs that can be included in that Sitemap. A Sitemap file located at http://example.com/catalog/sitemap.xml can include any URLs starting with http://example.com/catalog/ but can not include URLs starting with http://example.com/images/.
If you have the permission to change http://example.org/path/sitemap.xml, it is assumed that you also have permission to provide information for URLs with the prefix http://example.org/path/. Examples of URLs considered valid in http://example.com/catalog/sitemap.xml include:
Sitemap Example
URLs not considered valid in http://example.com/catalog/sitemap.xml include:
Note that this means that all URLs listed in the Sitemap must use the same protocol (http, in this example) and reside on the same host as the Sitemap. For instance, if the Sitemap is located at http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml, it can't include URLs from http://subdomain.example.com.
URLs that are not considered valid are dropped from further consideration. It is strongly recommended that you place your Sitemap at the root directory of your web server. For example, if your web server is at example.com, then your Sitemap index file would be at http://example.com/sitemap.xml. In certain cases, you may need to produce different Sitemaps for different paths (e.g., if security permissions in your organization compartmentalize write access to different directories).
If you submit a Sitemap using a path with a port number, you must include that port number as part of the path in each URL listed in the Sitemap file. For instance, if your Sitemap is located at http://www.example.com:100/sitemap.xml, then each URL listed in the Sitemap must begin with http://www.example.com:100.
Validating your Sitemap
The following XML schemas define the elements and attributes that can appear in your Sitemap file. You can download this schema from the links below:
For Sitemaps:http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd
For Sitemap index files:http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/siteindex.xsd
There are a number of tools available to help you validate the structure of your Sitemap based on this schema. You can find a list of XML-related tools at each of the following locations:
http://www.w3.org/XML/Schema#Tools
http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2000/12/13/schematools.html
Sitemap Checker
In order to validate your Sitemap or Sitemap index file against a schema, the XML file will need additional headers as shown below.
Sitemap:
Sitemap index file:
Sitemap Xml
Extending the Sitemaps protocol
You can extend the Sitemaps protocol using your own namespace. Simply specify this namespace in the root element. For example:
Informing search engine crawlers
Once you have created the Sitemap file and placed it on your webserver, you need to inform the search engines that support this protocol of its location by submitting it to them via the search engine's submission interface or an HTTP request.
The search engines can then retrieve your Sitemap and make the URLs available to their crawlers.
Last Updated: 16 November 2006