An XML Sitemap is an easy for webmasters to tell search engines about all the pages on the whole website. It does not boost search rankings, but helps search engines better crawl your website. So do you know whether you need XML sitemap on your site and how to create a sitemap in WordPress? If you have the same questions, find answers in this article, in which we tell you what is the XML sitemap, and ways to create sitemap in WordPress as the following.
What’s an XML Sitemap?
A sitemap is a web page which lists all the page of the entire website, making it easier for search engines crawl all pages of a website, and for users to find the page they are looking for, or to browse the whole site without clicking through a lot of links.
There are two typical versions of sitemap –HTML sitemap and XML sitemap
HTML sitemaps are written in html, designed for helping visitors and engine bots easily find pages on the website. It always includes some important and useful pages but does not contain every subpage.
XML Sitemaps are written in XML (Extensible Markup Language),used by web developer to submit a sitemap to tell search engines about the pages on your site, their relative importance to each pother and how often they are updated. All these jobs are done for search engines, and website users don’ need to see them.
Is XML Sitemap Necessary for WordPress Sites?
Is XML sitemap necessary for WordPress sites? Definitely! XML sitemaps make great sense to search engine optimization so that it is important not only for WordPress sites, but also all types of websites.
If you are running a new blog or website, sitemaps are very useful. Generally, new websites do not get many backlinks to the individual pages so that it’s not easy for search engines to index all the pages and posts. However, with sitemaps which automatically informs search engines about pages that are available for crawling, your site can be crawled more efficiently.
If you have a powerful website, sitemaps help your site tell search engines the relevance between pages and the update frequency. Search engines can judge how often your site update and identify which parts are more frequently updated than others so that they will set proper crawl rate for your site. This makes your site are more visible to search engines and can be quicker crawled than others.
XML sitemap has a significant impact on search engine optimization. However, note that it does not influence search rankings.
How to Create XML Sitemaps in WordPress Sites?
There are multiple ways to create an XML sitemap in a WordPress site, and usually using WordPress sitemap plugins can be the easiest one. There are plenty of plugin options, however, we recommend you going with the Top 5 Sitemaps Plugins for WordPress which are reviewed by professional editors. In below, we take an example with Google XML Sitemap plugin.
Log into your WordPress admin panel, go to plugins.
Install and activate Google XML sitemap plugin.
Go to settings – > XML Sitemap./li>
Click the “click here”, and your sitemap will be automatically generated in seconds.
Tell Search Engines about Sitemaps
The search engines like Google are clever to find a sitemap. No matter when you publish a new post or page, a ping is sent to search engines to notify them about the changes. However, we still recommend you submitting your sitemap to search engines by hand so that they will show you errors, pages indexed and other relevant stats.
Here, we just take Google as example.
Go to Google Webmaster Tools and sign in with your Google account.
Click “add a site” button, and then add your site link.
You will be linked to the verification page which asked to verify the ownership of your site. Choose the right method to verify yourself.
You will see a notice like “Congratulations you have successfully verified your ownership of www.yoursite.com”. Click “continue” to see webmaster tools dashboard for your site.
You can see that no sitemaps in Sitemaps column. Click on the red “Add/TEST SITEMAP” button and enter the url of your sitemap.
Click “submit sitemap” button at last. It will spend a while for Google to crawl your site. At last, you can see the stats about your sitemap.
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