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Video Summary
XML stands for Extensible Markup Language, and a sitemap is a file where you provide information about the pages and files of your website, and the relationships between them. An XML sitemap helps search engines crawl the existing pages of your website. It’s like a roadmap listing all the important stuff so Google can find everything easily.
Do you want your website to show up in the search results? Sitemaps help with that! They make it easier and faster for web crawlers, or search engine bots, to index your website. And if it’s easier and faster indexing, then new pages, and changed pages, show up sooner.
All right, why is an XML sitemap important? I mean, what’s so good about them anyway? Watch this video to find out.
Video Transcript
XML stands for Extensible Markup Language, and a sitemap is a file where you provide information about the pages and files of your website, and the relationships between them. An XML sitemap helps search engines crawl the existing pages of your website. It’s like a roadmap listing all the important stuff so Google can find everything easily.
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Why is an XML Sitemap Important?
All right, why is an XML sitemap important? I mean, what’s so good about them anyway?
Do you want your website to show up in the search results? Sitemaps help with that! They make it easier and faster for web crawlers, or search engine bots, to index your website. And if it’s easier and faster indexing, then new pages, and changed pages, show up sooner.
Without a sitemap, you have to rely on the crawlers finding every link to every page of your site. They have to look at all the content, find all internal links, and look at each of those pages for more links. That process has to be repeated until the crawler goes through your entire site. For a small site, that’s not much of a problem, but for a large site, it might require several crawler visits to find everything.
But, what happens if a web page is not linked to a known page? Or what if there is a link to a page, but the page the link is on is not known or does not allow crawlers to access? In those cases, the search bots will have a hard time. They may not find the page. Sitemaps solve this problem.
They make things easier by showing search engines which URLs are important so they can crawl and index them right away. The faster they do that, the faster your pages appear when someone does a search! It’s critical to have an XML sitemap especially if your website has a lot of pages.
If you have thousands of pages, or even hundreds of pages of content, then you shouldn’t even think about it. Just do it. Put a sitemap in place.
Likewise, if you are frequently adding content, which in turn adds new pages to your website, then you should also have a sitemap regardless of how big your site is. If you’re adding content, then your site is growing, and you want to make sure Google knows about that growth.
Furthermore, an article by Google also recommends XML sitemaps for new websites with few internal links and for websites that use rich media content. In other words, if you have more advanced features in your site such as audio and video or interactive features, then use a sitemap.
There are limits to sitemaps though. If your website has more than 50,000 URLs, or the sitemap itself would exceed 50 MB in size, you’ll have to create a second XML sitemap.
What URLs Should You Include Within Your Sitemap?
Start by identifying which pages you want your visitors to find. It’s important to put all of these into the sitemap.
At the same time, consider if there are specific pages within your site that you do not want indexed. A good example is a “thank you page”. You probably don’t want someone entering your site through a thank you page without first taking a specific action.
If you don’t want it indexed, be sure it does not go into the XML sitemap. Plus, you’ll want to take some extra steps to make sure the page is marked as “no index”. That’s a different subject though, not part of this video. So, let’s get practical… If you published a new blog post this week, you would want it to appear in the search results and reach your target audience as fast as possible, right?
If so, you would want to add this new post to your XML sitemap. When there is a new item in a sitemap, Google finds it quickly and knows that it’s ready to index. If you don’t have it in the sitemap, then it waits until whatever point a link is found in your site pointing to the new page or the new post.
Likewise, if you change an old post, the sitemap can be updated with the change date. This way Google knows to check the modified page right away, rather than on some infrequent visitation schedule.
How do the search engines know where your sitemap is located? Well, there is a default location. You simply include sitemap.xml in the top level of your website. In other words, your sitemap would have the address of yourbusiness.com/sitemap.xml.
If you want to change the location of your sitemap, then you have to tell the crawlers, the bots, where to find your sitemap. You would use the robots.txt file to do that. Again, this is outside the scope of this video. Just know that it is possible to change the location from the default if you have to.
For Google, there is another way you can communicate the sitemap location. You would go into your Google Search Console and look for the Sitemaps menu item. There is an option here to add a new sitemap by pasting your URL and clicking submit. By doing this, you’ll be able to monitor if your URLs are being indexed by Google and make some modifications if there are errors.
Having an XML sitemap also helps you improve your SEO! Since XML sitemaps help search engines easily find your URLs, then it will also help you with your search results ranking. The faster Google finds your updated content, the faster your pages appear in the search results, and the more users see your content.
How To Build and Submit a Sitemap
According to an article by Google, there are three steps in order to build, and submit, a sitemap. The first step is to choose the format you want to use.
Google supports several formats such as XML, RSS, mRSS, Atom 1.0, and Text. Then, you create your sitemap either manually or automatically by using plugins in WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, and other dashboards. Finally, submit the sitemap to Google by adding it to your robots.txt file or by putting it in your .
Creating XML sitemaps may seem like a lot of hard work if you’re not using any plugins. But it’s not actually that hard, especially if you’re using WordPress. When WordPress version 5.5 was released, it came with basic XML sitemap features so you can get an XML sitemap without any plugins. Simply add wp-sitemap.xml to the end of your domain URL and, voila, your default XML sitemap is ready to go!
Though this feature is handy for beginners, it’s not perfect because you have no control. You cannot add or remove any URLs from your sitemap like you’d be able to with full-featured plugins.
So, that’s it! Now that you know what XML sitemaps are, and why they’re important, it’s time to check yours! Do you have one? If so, have you submitted it to Google and other search engines?
If not, then now is the best time to check it out. Start by going to your website with slash sitemap.xml at the end, and see if you have some kind of sitemap that shows up already. If you don’t, it’s time to create one. And if you do, then make sure it’s listed in your Google Search Console.
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