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Search engines crawl the Internet to find and index website pages. Over the years, search engines have become sophisticated and crawled efficiently, but they still expect the website to guide them by presenting an index of all web pages.
When a search engine crawler visits a website, it checks the sitemap to locate all the web pages on the site. Using WordPress sitemaps, crawlers can index web pages efficiently and this is the primary reason why sitemaps form the basis of search engine optimization (SEO) of any website.
The Importance of Sitemaps
Sitemaps are a smart technique to quickly index a website. Instead of crawling all links one by one, search engine bots simply go through the URLs listed in the sitemap and index them. During the process, search engine bots pick up essential information about web pages such as the last updated timestamp and the importance of the page.
Sitemaps have no direct impact on your site's SERP ranking. They are necessary to index your site so that they can be included in search engine results. In fact, it can be a challenge for new websites to achieve SERP rankings on their own without backlinks support.
Another important aspect of implementing a sitemap is to keep the search engine updated with the structure of your website. If you update your website or add a new page, these changes will only be reflected in the SERP if you have included the changes in the sitemap. Even after this, the change can only be visible after the next visit of the search engine bot.
Now let's go ahead and see how it can be made with WordPress.
What is an XML Sitemap?
Traditionally, websites had an HTML sitemap. These sitemaps were used by visitors to quickly find published web pages. Nowadays, websites use an XML sitemap that search engines find easier to use than an HTML sitemap.
In simple words, an XML sitemap is simply a list of URLs that you want search engines to know and index for SERP visibility.
Xml sitemap
The way data is introduced makes the data inside XML sitemaps useless for humans. In XML sitemaps, URLs are listed inside tags that define the type of information contained within you. This representation of data is useful for search engine bots (such as GoogleBot) because the tag structure allows them to easily crawl and index URLs.
HTML sitemap
The HTML sitemap shows the visual representation of all web pages in the website. This is useful for visitors who want to visit a page quickly. It may seem an overkill to implement an HTML sitemap as the current website search functionality is greatly improved. The experts recommend that WordPress websites should have both XML and HTML sitemaps for the following reasons.
Both are XML and HTML sitemaps help search engines crawl your website.
HTML sitemaps provide a visual aid to users who are looking for a specific page on a website.
XML sitemaps are needed to send the website to Google (discussed later).
Although XML and HTML both sitemaps are important for WordPress websites, if you are limited to only one type, go for HTML sitemaps as it serves all purposes.
How to create XML sitemap in WordPress?
Create an XML sitemap for your WordPress website is a simple matter. You can opt for any of the following methods:
Create a Sitemap via the WordPress Sitemap Plugin Of the ways to create a sitemap, the easiest way would be to use the WordPress sitemap plugin.
In this process, the plugin does all the work and you get an updated XML file that you can deploy on the site.
In this tutorial, I will be using three WordPress sitemap plugins to create an XML sitemap for your website.
1. Yoast SEO
Go to WordPress Dashboard → Plugins → Add New and Find Yoast. Then install and activate the plugin.
Click on Yoast SEO from the side menu. inside the wordpress dashboard, click on the Features tab where you will see that the XML Sitemap option is enabled by default.
Click the question mark tooltip icon to view your WordPress sitemap. You have successfully enabled the XML sitemap on your site. The wordpress plugin will continue to update the XML sitemap.
2. All in one SEO pack
All in One SEO Pack is another popular WordPress sitemap plugin that is used by many WordPress sites. Let's view how easy it is to create a WordPress sitemap using the above plugin.
From your WordPress admin dashboard, navigate to Plugins → Add New and find the All in One SEO Pack, then install and activate the plugin.
Navigate to All in One SEO → Feature Manager and activate the Free XML Sitemap Add-on.
Once activated, the XML Sitemap option will appear under the All in One SEO tab. The plugin will also create a WordPress sitemap.
Inside the Plugin additional settings can be configured by going inside the XML Sitemap Settings page.
3. XML Sitemaps and Google News Feed
XML sitemaps and Google News feeds are also used to create sitemaps for WordPress sites. Let us see how this plugin can be configured to create an XML sitemap.
inside the plugin go to the Plugins tab and click Add New. Search for XML Sitemaps and Google News Feed Plugin and activate it after installation.
Go to Settings and click on the XML Sitemap option.
From Settings, you can configure Post Priority, XML Sitemap content, and set the frequencies for your web pages to be crawled by a search engine.
By now you have seen how to create an XML sitemap using three WordPress Sitemap plugins. However, sometimes you do not have the option to use the plugin. In such cases, you can choose other tools to generate the wordpress website's XML sitemap online.
Create a Sitemap using the WordPress Sitemap Generator for WordPress
The WordPress Sitemap Generator tool can be used to generate an XML sitemap.
Go to the XML Sitemap Generator site and go to the online XML Sitemap Generator.
On the next page, enter all the required information and such as wordpress website URL, frequency, email address etc. and click on the generated sitemap.
Is that all! Your brand new WordPress website sitemap is generated which can be downloaded for further use.
Download the sitemap file and upload it to your WordPress site and link it to the Google Search Console (discussed later).
How to create HTML sitemap in WordPress?
After creating an XML sitemap, let's take a look at how to create an HTML sitemap for WordPress websites. To do this, install and activate the WP Sitemap Page plugin on your site.
Go to Settings and click on the WP Sitemap page.
From the Settings page, you can configure posts, display pages, and how to display password-protected content. Simple HTML sitemaps can be displayed by placing shortcodes on the desired page.
How to submit a sitemap to Google?
Create a sitemap for your WordPress site is just part of the job. To complete the task and maximize the benefits, you must also submit it to Google. This is an essential step if you have already integrated Google Analytics with your WordPress website.
For this, log into your Google Search Console, click on the name of your website and in the dashboard, go to Crawl → Sitemap.
At the top, click the ADD / TEST SITEMAP button to submit or test an existing sitemap of your website.
Just! You have successfully submitted your sitemap to Google. The process of submitting sitemaps on other search engines like Bing is largely the same.
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