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You have been subscribed. Start free or get a demo. Marketing 10 min read. Sitemaps are one of SEO's oldies but goodies. In a nutshell: you can't live without 'em. I've often heard that they can feel overwhelming and quite technical to understand. What is a sitemap? It's important for various reasons, including: Acting as a roadmap for Google and other search engines to find and better understand your content.
Leading search engines through your website to crawl and index the essential pages. Helping search identify when new pages and updates to old pages are available. Helping search engines find alternate language versions of your page. Here's the basic difference: HTML sitemaps: This is more like your content sitemap that users can see and use to navigate your site.
Types of Sitemaps From these two types of sitemaps described above, there are also subsections within them. Page Sitemap A page sitemap or regular sitemap improves the indexations of pages and posts. Video Sitemap An XML video sitemap is similar to a page sitemap, but of course focuses largely on video content, which means they are only necessary if videos are critical to your business.
But if you do need a video sitemap, it would look like this: Note: This is what a video sitemap looks like. News Sitemap If you publish news and want to get those news articles featured on top stories and Google News, you need a news sitemap. Image Sitemap Like the video sitemaps, image sitemaps are only necessary if images are critical to your business, such as a photography or stock photo site.
Sitemap Index There are a few limitations you'll want to keep in mind for sitemaps: Having too many URLs will only lead to no indexation of some of your pages.
All sitemaps, except the news sitemap, should have a maximum of 50, URLs. News sitemaps should have a maximum of URLs. A sitemap should be a maximum of 50MB in uncompressed file size. That looks like this: Sitemap Priorities Adding priorities to your sitemap is one of the things many people do to differentiate between how important different pages are, but Google's Gary Illyes mentioned that Google ignores these priorities.
In his exact words: Generally speaking, as long as you are honest about when your content was actually modified, include it in your sitemap so that Google and other search engines know to re-crawl the modified page and index the new content.
How to Create a Sitemap In this section, I will show you how to create a sitemap without using any generator or plugin. These are the exact steps to follow to create a sitemap manually: 1. Decide which pages on your site should be crawled by Google, and determine the canonical version of each page.
Determine if you need more than one sitemap. If you have multiple sitemap files, create a sitemap index file and include the links to the individual sitemaps you created. This one is already described in the section titled "Sitemap Index". Sitemap Generators Most of us marketers do not have a web development background, so we can't code to save our lives.
It's especially great if you have different language versions of your pages hreflang tags. If your website is custom-coded and is not on any CMS or builder that generates a sitemap, you need to use a generator like TechnicalSEO.
In Screaming Frog, ensure you are using the spider mode. You can do that by clicking on "Mode" and selecting "spider". Then type the URL of your home page and let it crawl. When it's done, click on "Sitemaps.
Follow these steps: 1. Look at a sitemap template and figure out how your pages would be displayed on the table. 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. 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.
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. 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. If you have any experience with HTML coding, this will be a breeze for you. Start by getting a text editor where you can create an XML file. Sublime Text is a great option for you to consider. 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. Any time you code manually, human error is possible.
Fortunately, there are tools that will help validate your code to ensure the syntax is correct. For example, if you forget to add an end tag or something like that, it can quickly be identified and fixed. 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. For example:. Because of this, an XML image sitemap is unnecessary for most websites.
Including an image sitemap would only waste crawl budget. The exception to this is if images help drive your business, such as a stock photo website or ecommerce site gaining product page sessions from Google Image search.
Similar to images, if videos are critical to your business, submit an XML video sitemap. If not, a video sitemap is unnecessary. Save your crawl budget for the page the video is embedded into, ensuring you markup all videos with JSON-LD as a schema. Google recommends to use schema.
Because Mueller confirmed mobile sitemaps are for feature phone pages only. Not for smartphone-compatibility. So unless you have unique URLs specifically designed for featured phones, a mobile sitemap will be of no benefit. XML sitemaps take care of search engine needs. HTML sitemaps were designed to assist human users to find content.
The question becomes, if you have a good user experience and well crafted internal links, do you need a HTML sitemap? HTML sitemaps are generally linked in website footers. Taking link equity from every single page of your website. Ask yourself. Those sitemaps are meant for your visitors to find content on your website, while XML sitemaps are meant for search engines.
XML Sitemaps help search engines to assess your website's content, and is a mechanism to notify them of new or updated content. Therefore it's recommended to implement them whenever feasible. Fortunately XML is also quite readable for humans as well, so let's take a look at an example:. Help search engines find and index your new content. This header denotes that the contents is structured according to version 1.
It basically informs search engines what they can expect from the file. This urlset definition encapsulates all the URLs contained in the sitemap and describes which version of the XML Sitemap standard is used.
Note that the urlset gets closed at the bottom of the document:. Finally we get to the most important part: the definition of the individuals URLs through the url -tag.
Every URL definition needs to contain at least the loc -tag short for location. The value of this tag should be the full URL of the page, including the protocol e. However, if for any reason this is not possible you can choose a different location or filename, as long as you reference it in your robots. Let's dissect this file as well! Nothing new here, just like with the XML Sitemap file we first define that the file is in XML format and which character encoding is used.
Now, instead of a urlset definition we see a sitemapindex definition. This definition encapsulates all the sitemaps contained in the sitemap index and again which version of the XML Sitemap standard is used. Just like the urlset definition the sitemapindex definition is closed at the bottom of the document:. And then on to the meat: the actual definition of the individuals sitemaps. On top of that the sitemap definition may optionally contain a lastmod definition. The date when the referenced XML sitemap was last updated.
Again in " W3C datetime opens in a new tab " format. But again you're free to deviate from this, as long as you reference it in your robots. Make sure that your XML Sitemap provides an up-to-date picture of your website. Whenever a page is removed it should also be delisted from your XML Sitemap. If you're using the optional lastmod -tag, make sure to update the timestamp whenever the page changes.
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