You must have come across government sites that used to have a series of links on the bottom of their main or landing pages, called “Sitemap”.
It contained all the links to web pages on that site. Indeed, even today a few sites have such HTML and more advanced version XML sitemaps whose audience is a search engine and not people. What is a WordPress XML sitemap? How can I create a sitemap in WordPress?
How can I submit Sitemap on Google? For all the WordPress beginners, this guide will provide you with the right answers to all your queries.
What is a WordPress XML Sitemap?
It is basically a list of web pages on a website that users and search bots can access. While sitemaps don’t help your search engine rankings, it helps them to crawl and index it easily. In this way, the website can guide visitors and the search engines to all the pages of the site.
Sitemaps term was first introduced in 1994 and 1995 when it was considered a need to incorporate sitemaps on the website. In those times, a sitemap was the fundamental way for the people to navigate a website without getting lost before user-friendly navigation was introduced by web designers.
You may believe that now since we have better navigation set up, we don’t require sitemaps. You are wrong here. They have become significant from an SEO perspective and are recommended by every SEO expert India. Here are a couple of advantages regarding why sitemaps are necessary for your website-
- They improve your website’s visibility on the search engines and guarantee fast crawl
- Sitemaps advise search engines about changes on your site structure
- It additionally helps search engines bots to crawl huge sites like eCommerce stores which have many web pages and are not well-organized or interlinked
In this tutorial, you will get to know about all kinds of sitemaps, and how to add a sitemap to WordPress.
- What you’ll require
Before you start this guide you’ll require access to the WordPress admin.
- Difference between XML and HTML Sitemaps
Sitemaps can be classified into two types namely – XML and HTML sitemaps.
- XML sitemap
As mentioned above, the XML sitemap is principally for search engines. It also contains metadata alongside the site’s URLs. It contains all the data including any semblance of when a specific URL was last refreshed, how soon the progressions happen, and so on.
- HTML sitemap
HTML sitemap is made for the ease of visitors to navigate a website. It tells the clients where the ‘About Us’ or Services pages and pages of other importance are. It additionally helps in boosting your search engine positioning of your site.
Both HTML and XML sitemaps bring about simple indexing of the pages via search engines. I prescribe having both sitemaps for your WordPress website. It will guarantee that you are not missing any regarding search engine optimization for the betterment of your rankings, while additionally ensuring that you are providing a good user experience to your visitors.
Step to Step Guide To Create XML Sitemap in WordPress
You can create WordPress XML sitemap in various ways. In this, you will figure out how to include a sitemap utilizing WordPress plugins..
- Choice 1. Create XML Sitemap with SEO Yoast Plugin
Yoast SEO is a WordPress plugin. It is utilized broadly for optimizing of a WordPress site by SEO consultant India. It deals with all the technical angles identified with the content and helps you measure the keywords density, H1 and H2 labels, and so on. It can also help you in making XML sitemaps. Yoast SEO publishes multiple sitemaps for your site.
Read the following steps so as to add XML sitemap to your WordPress site:
- Install and activate the SEO Yoast from the plugin directory.
- When the plugin is activated, go to Features and enable the Advanced settings.
- It will enable XML sitemap and XML Sitemaps will show up under SEO menu. Here you can oversee different settings like exclude specific pages/posts from the sitemap, and so on. Except if you need a customize sitemap, you don’t have to do anything here.
This is how you create XML sitemap in your WordPress website. You can discover your sitemap URL under the title “Your XML Sitemap”.
- Choice 2. Create XML Sitemap with Google XML Sitemaps
This plugin can also be utilized for creating XML sitemap for your site.
It makes producing sitemaps for search engines like Ask, Google, Yahoo, and Bing quite easy. It makes sitemaps for all WordPress pages and custom URLs. Moreover, it also informs all search engines whenever the new content is posted or page is added.
Here are a couple of steps you have to follow in order to add XML Sitemap using Google:
- Install and activate this plugin from WordPress Plugin Directory.
- When enabled, it will create a sitemap for your site.
- Open the plugin configuration page by tapping on Settings – > XML Sitemap. Here you can find out your custom WordPress URLs, change setting like excluding posts, and so on.
- Stage 2. Submitting WordPress XML Sitemap to Search Engines
When the XML sitemap is prepared, submit it to Google search console. The initial step is to confirm you as the site’s owner. You can use verification methods to do that.
- When done, open Google Search Console and select your site.
- Click on the Crawl and select Sitemaps
- Click on the Add/Test Sitemap.
- Enter your WordPress sitemap URL and submit it.
In the event that your site contains many pictures or videos you can also make a picture or video sitemap.
Conclusion
Sitemaps from its inception have been fundamental parts of our sites. The point of making a site is to take into account the requirements of the users, and further secure top positioning on SERPs. Both these necessary details are met by sitemaps.
By following the steps mentioned above, you can create a XML sitemap for your WordPress site and submit it to Google without any difficulties. Website Designing Company in Faridabad makes creating a sitemap easy for you.
