Why should we use a XML Sitemap?

XML stands for “Extensible Markup Language”. It's a way of displaying information on websites. 

What is an XML sitemap?

A sitemap is an XML document, containing the list of information about URLs of each web pages on a website that helps to tell Search engine like Google, Bing, and others to crawl and index web pages on their search result page.

The sitemap of a website also carries information about each page, including when it was created and last modified, and its importance relative to other pages.

Do I need an XML Sitemap?

Is a sitemap strictly important? No, not technically. Your website will still work without a sitemap, and it can even be crawled and indexed by search engines. Also, sitemaps aren’t used as a ranking signal, so submitting one won’t make you rank higher.

Why do I need a sitemap?

The biggest reason you should create and submit your XML sitemap is to speeds up the process of indexing pages.

A sitemap allows the crawlers of your site to get to all areas of your website no matter the size. This helps with Search Engine Optimization because it makes it easier for search engines to find all the content on your website.

Sitemaps also help search engines crawl your pages more intelligently.

It shows your site links (other pages of your website). And also the Search Engine can Categorise your webpages according to their type/services.

When do I use Sitemaps?

If the site is large.

If your site is huge, there are even more possibilities of Search engines bots ignoring or missing out on crawling some of the new or recently updated pages on your website.

If the site has a large number of pages that are isolated or well not linked to each other.
If there are a lot of pages on your site that are not naturally linked with each other, there are again, chances that Search engines bots could ignore those pages.

If the site is new and has few external links to it.

Search engines bots crawl the web, following one link to another and so on. So, if you have only a few external links pointing to your site, Google might not discover some of your pages.

If the site uses rich media content or Ajax.

These are not easily crawled by Search engines, so it would be much better if you provide a Sitemap for Search engines to take additional information into account, wherever required.

Which websites need a sitemap?

Top search engine like  Google and Bing claims that sitemaps are helpful for…

• New websites
• Large websites
• Websites with rich media content
• Websites with lots of content that’s not well linked

NOTE: If you want to auto index your website on search engine then you need to create an XML sitemap for your website.

What File Types are Supported by XML Sitemaps?

Search engine like Google can detect various file types of Sitemaps. These are particular to the type of content on a site and help search engines classify the files much more easily.

List of Sitemap Filetypes:

• HTML
• Video
• Image
• Mobile
• News

Sitemap Example:

<?xml version=”1.0” encoding=”UTF-8”>
<urlset xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9” xmlns:xhtml=”http:www.w3.org/1999/xhtml”>
   <url>
      <loc>https://www.example.com</loc>
      <lastmod>2019-10-06</lastmod>
      <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
      <priority>0.9</priority>
      <xhtml:link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”en” href=”https://www.example.com”/>
      <xhtml:link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”fr” href=”https://www.example.com/fr”/>
   </url>

Tools to Generate XML Sitemaps

XML-Sitemaps

Sitemap Generator - XML sitemap generator Tool to build Site map

Free Sitemap Generator

CMS plugins for generating XML Sitemaps

• XML Sitemap – Drupal
• XML Sitemap – OS Commerce Three
• XML Sitemap – WordPressOne
• XML Sitemap – Joomla

Where to put sitemap.xml?

It is strongly recommended that you Put your Sitemap at the root directory(Most of the time its called 'web', 'www' or 'public_html') of your HTML server; that is, place it at http://example.com/sitemap.xml.

Make your sitemap available to Google (Submit your sitemap to Google)

There are a few different ways to make your sitemap available to Google:

• Submit it to Google using the Search Console Sitemaps tool
• Insert the following line anywhere in your robots.txt file, specifying the path to your sitemap:Sitemap: http://example.com/sitemap_location.xml
• Use the "ping" functionality to ask us to crawl your sitemap. Send an HTTP GET request like this: http://www.google.com/ping?sitemap=<complete_url_of_sitemap> for example:http://www.google.com/ping?sitemap=https://example.com/sitemap.xml

In case you have more about Sitemap, welcome to share them by commenting below!