A sitemap tells Google which pages and files you think are important in your site, and also provides valuable information about these files. It contain information about the pages, videos, and other files of your site, and also define the relationships between them. Search engines like Google read this file to crawl your site.
For example, when the page was last updated or any new content been added and many more.
In simple word, A sitemap is a blueprint of your site, provides information to search engine crawlers about specific types of content on your pages, including video, image, and news content.
Types of Sitemap
- Normal XML Sitemap
- Video Sitemap
- News Sitemap
- Image Sitemap
Importance of Sitemap
Search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing are using sitemap for finding different pages on your site for a specific information.
Sitemaps are always recognized by popular search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and more, enabling one single file to be submitted and in future when there are changes made to the website, the file simply be updated as needed. So you can improve your quality of content any time without a whole lot of hassle. In certain cases, we probably don’t NEED a sitemap. But if you bet on it then it won’t disturb your SEO work. So it not causes you anything by using sitemap.
For example, Google finds webpages through links. And if your site is new in community and has a handful external backlinks, then a sitemap is playing an important role for helping Google to find pages on your site.
If you run an ecommerce site with millions of pages. and have a ton of external links, in this case search engine’s crawlers going to have a tough time in finding all of those pages. That’s where sitemaps come in to play.
If Pages of your sites are properly linked, Google discover most of your site. In most cases, your site will benefit from having a sitemap, and you’ll never be penalized for having one.
Some of the cases are:
If your site is really large. It’s more likely Google web crawlers might overlook crawling some of your new or recently updated pages.
Your site has a massive content pages that are not linked to each other in a good way. If your site pages don’t naturally reference each other, so you can list them in a sitemap so that Google doesn’t overlook some of your pages.
Your site is very new to search engine with few external links to it. Google bot or other web crawlers crawl the web by following links from one page to another.
Your site has a lots of unique media content like videos, images or is shown in Google News. Google will able to take additional information from sitemaps into account for search, where appropriate.
How do I submit a Sitemap to Google?
Once the sitemap has been built, only things need to be done is to uploaded sitemap to site and then submitted to Google. But it can be easily done through Google’s search console. Before submitting your sitemap, you first verify your domain on Google search console. So that Google will identify you as the website owner. For you submit your sitemap you must:
Select your site on the search console.
- Click on crawl.
- Click on sitemaps.
- Click on add/test site map.
- Type in site map.XML.
- Lastly, click on submit site map.
Experts highly recommended to submit a sitemap after updating content or publishing your own website. It will ensure you that the search engines like google find the most updated version of your website and then better serve it to those who are searching for the same. SEO in regards to a sitemap not be overlooked it is very good for SEO practice.
I hope you find this particular information about Sitemap is helpful or informative.
Thank you!!
