Sitemap is basically a list of pages of a website organized in a hierarchical manner and accessible to crawlers. It acts like a tool for search engines as it informs crawler about all the web page contained in a website. In technical language, it is a host file made by the developer to let the search engines know about the others files of your account. Sitemap represents detailed information about the content. These are majorly used to improve the indexing process of the website through a search engine, but they may help you get easy accessibility of certain pages as well. It does not affect the usual way of page indexing by crawler bots.

Creating a sitemap for a new website is a necessity in order to host it effectively in the search engines and make navigation hassle-free. Sitemaps differ in sizes and shapes depending upon the web code. There are two types of sitemaps:

HTML Sitemap : It is used to help visitors to navigate your website easily.

: It is used to help visitors to navigate your website easily. XML Sitemap: It is used to make the crawling of your site easy by search engine bots.

UNDERSTANDING XML SITEMAP

Before we discuss steps towards XML Sitemap construction, it is important that you must understand what XML sitemap is and how it is important from SEO perspective?

An XML Sitemap is a usually linear or top down list of the content hierarchy in a website. It suggests the users the route map to reach to their destination page. For this purpose, it provides URLs to the web crawlers to get information about meta tags of each page. The more links to data for the web crawlers means the more search engine optimized the website is. Hence, to make an SEO friendly site and to let the user have an easy navigation experience XML sitemaps are a must. If you wish to create sitemaps for users, then you can go for HTML sitemaps.

One might ask why two sitemaps are necessary. This question has an evident answer, i.e. one is for humans, and the other is for Googlebot. In that relation, it is essential to make clear that having two sitemaps is not considered as duplicate content. Even Google openly states that using a sitemap will never lead to the penalty.

STEP –BY–STEP GUIDE FOR CREATING AN XML SITEMAP

STEP-1

There are many online tools available that you can use to create XML sitemap. Here, I have discussed the process of sitemap creation using this website — http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/. If you wish to know how to create a sitemap for a Wordpress website, then you must first know how to use the Yoast Plugin as it includes a function for WordPress sitemaps creation.

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STEP-2

Step two involves downloading the XML Sitemap created in the first step.

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The downloaded file is an uncompressed sitemap which needs further editing for priorities and frequency.

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STEP-3

Here, we need to select the right tool for editing the downloaded file. Notepad ++ has been proved to be a very effective software for this purpose. It helps in setting the priorities and frequency perfectly. You must save the file on your PC and start editing/ modifying the desired changes on the every page.

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While editing the file, you must ensure that you do not delete any information/tags by mistake. For this purpose, you must be really attentive and should read the text in-depth. If somehow you end up deleting some key information like URL, <url>, etc, you have to read the entire sitemap again and again until you spot the issue.

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STEP 4

This is the final step which involves the implementation of the sitemap in the source code. You may do it personally or hire a professional developer for this purpose. However, do not try to experiment intervene only if you have master coding skills.

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After implementation, file is ready to be submitted to Google Webmaster Tools/Bing Webmaster Tools. All you need to do is — Fill out the required fields as per the below screenshots and submit.

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If you are willing to setup the sitemap of your website, hope we have explained you well so that you can at least give a self-try by following the step by step guide we have shared above for setting XML sitemap.