A sitemap helps search engines crawl your entire website easily. Here are the 10 easy tips to optimize your XML sitemaps.
The sitemap is the page where all your website posts, pages, images, videos, and other files on your website are listed. Not just listed but arranged in a prioritized way as important to less important, you can set the priorities you want.
Talking about the sitemap, this page helps search engines like Google to crawl your entire website effectively. And also, tell about which page or post is vital on your websites. Currently, creating a sitemap and submitting it to the search console is becoming too standard practice.
It is actually unnecessary to create and submit a sitemap as soon as you start the website. According to the information on Google Search Central, there is no need for a sitemap if your websites have less than 500 pages, but it’s better to create one.
Table of Contents
Why Is Sitemap Important?
When Google or any other web crawlers crawl your website, they can only crawl the pages interlink each other if you have not added the sitemap. As a result, the pages that are not linked to any other page on site will take lots of time to index or show up in the search engine.
A sitemap is navigation for web crawlers. The web crawlers will quickly get the information about all the stuff on your website to add to the search’s account, and ultimately your ranking will increase. Even Google has officially recommended having the sitemap for larger websites.
Pro Tips: If your website has fewer posts/pages and all of them are well interlinked with each other, Google can easily crawl and index your website even without a sitemap, so interlinking is very important.
How To Create An XML Sitemap?
You can create an XML sitemap in a few different ways. There are hundreds of plugins that help you make the sitemap for your website in just one click. You don’t need to install the additional plugin if you are using any SEO plugin for the content and website SEO optimization.
SEO optimization plugins like Yoast SEO, Rankmath provide you with the built-in function to create an XML sitemap. The feature of creating a sitemap is available in the free version of both plugins.
Now the question arises, but what if you are not using any SEO optimization plugin?
Don’t worry, you can still create a sitemap by installing the dedicated plugin for the sitemap. Google XML Sitemaps By Auctollo is one of the best and most used plugins for creating an XML sitemap among professionals.
Pro Tips: Few so-called SEO professionals will suggest you create a sitemap with the Google XML Sitemaps plugin even if you have the SEO optimization plugin installed on your website. It’s an entirely wrong way. An XML sitemap is an XML sitemap, no matter which plugin you have created.
How To Create XML Sitemap With Rank Math?
Currently, Rank Math is the most preferred plugin for WordPress SEO optimization. Here is how you can create an XML sitemap with Rank Math. Follow the below instructions carefully to be done with it.
First of all, you need to login into your website’s admin area and install the Rank Math plugin. You can simply install this plugin from the WordPress plugin library, Go to Plugins >> Click on Add New >> Search for Rank Math >> Click on Install and then Activate it.
Once you Activate the plugin, the Rank Math setup wizard will start. In the 5th step, you need to configure your sitemap settings.
If you are already using the Rank Math and just want to generate the XML sitemap, you can simply go to Rank Math >> And click on Sitemap settings. It will redirect you to the tab of General settings related to the XML sitemaps. You can entirely configure the sitemap of your website from here.
Checking Your Websites Sitemap
After creating, you can check the sitemap of your website on /sitemap.xml or /sitemap_index.xml.
For example:
If your domain name is https://example.com, then you can view the site on URL https://example.com/sitemap.xml or https://example.com/sitemap_index.xml.
Final Words
Those are the 10 useful tips to optimize your XML sitemap. As we have explained above, creating and submitting a sitemap to Google search console is very important. If you ask us for the preferred plugin, we suggest you go with Rank Math because this SEO optimization plugin offers you a comprehensive option to make your website ready to rank.
Pro Tips: No one will suggest you, but it is essential to submit the sitemap to Bing Webmaster Tools. Most bloggers or online service providers only think about Google SEO. Still, Being can also give you a good amount of traffic. It’s a preferred search engine in some United States localities.
Make sure you have prioritized the high volume web-pages in your sitemap. We hope this article about the 10 best and effective ways to optimize your XML sitemap is helpful for you. Do share this article with your friends and family if this article is useful for you in any manner.