Sitemaps make it easy for search engines to crawl and index your site. This helps ensure that your content will appear on search results pages. Search engine crawlers also use it to find broken links and error messages more easily. Experts at the leading Digital Marketing Agency in Mumbai will tell you that it's a simple process, and this article will show you how to create a sitemap for your website in under five minutes.
What is Sitemap?
Webmasters can help search engines better crawl their sites by creating and submitting sitemaps. A sitemap is an XML file that lists your site's URLs along with additional metadata when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is) to help search engines index your content more intelligently.
Web crawlers often find new pages by following links from other sites. Sitemaps help crawlers discover URLs that you want to be included in search engine results. If a crawler supports the Sitemap protocol, it will use the Sitemap to learn about any of your URLs not found elsewhere. Using the Sitemap protocol does not guarantee that your site will appear in search engine results, but it does provide hints for web crawlers to do a better job of bringing your site to the attention of searchers.
URL of the page
When the page was last updated (optional)
How frequently the page will change.
Rules in Sitemap?
Make sure that when you save the sitemap.xml file, you do so using UTF-8 encoding.
Let's put the sitemap at the root directory of the website.
Sitemap files cannot contain more than 50,000 URLs and must be no larger than 50 MB uncompressed.
A sitemap index file can be used to point to lists of sitemaps and must follow these guidelines:
The index file itself must be UTF-8 encoded (you can generally do this when you save the file).
You can have multiple Sitemap index files, each with up to 50,000 Sitemaps and a maximum size of 50 MB (uncompressed).
You can notify Search Console about your Sitemap(s) using either a Sitemap index file or a solitary Sitemap, but not both. So if you already use a Sitemap index file for your Sitemaps, do not also try to submit individual Sitemaps from that same index file to Search Console. To submit individual sitemaps, remove them from your index file first.
What is In-page Sitemap
In-page Sitemaps are a great way to incorporate a site's structure into its design. They're also great for usability because they make content discoverable and help users navigate easily between sections or topics.
In-page Sitemaps are also a great tool for you to use in your work. They can make it easier for clients to understand what needs to be done on a site, and they can help you come up with new ideas that you might otherwise have missed.
Why use an in-page sitemap?
Search engines love text and HTML is made of text. An in-page sitemap ensures that a search engine can easily read your entire site without having to guess what your pages are about. Search engines are good at guessing, but why make them work when you don't have to?
What is Out-of-page Sitemap
Out-of-page sitemaps are an equally important, but lesser-known part of SEO. These sitemaps tell search engines which URLs shouldn't be indexed. This is necessary to prevent the indexing of all pages. For example, if you have a page that is meant only to be displayed after a user submits a form, you would want to prevent the page from being indexed by search engines so that your site doesn't appear to have duplicate content.
Experts at SEO Company in Mumbai will tell you that the robots.txt file, found in the root directory of your website, is used to disallow indexing of certain pages by search engines. The contents of this file can be viewed by anyone who visits yourdomain/robots.txt on your website. The robots.txt file does not affect human visitors, only search engine spiders and other bots.
Type of Sitemap
Sitemap types determine the format of the sitemap.
XML Sitemaps
The XML Sitemap protocol allows you to notify search engines about URLs on your site that are available for crawling. A Sitemap is a document that lists a website's URLs. It's used to tell search engines about each URL's last update date, how often it changes, and its relative importance. This way, web crawlers can pick up any URLs in a Sitemap and learn about each URL with the associated metadata. Using the Sitemap protocol won't guarantee that web pages will appear in search results, but it will make it easier for web crawlers to find your website.
You can add one or more files to a Sitemap index, which is itself an XML file following a specific format. There is no limit to the number of files you can include, up to 50,000 URLs per Sitemap.
HTML Sitemaps
HTML Sitemaps is a page on your website that lists all the important pages on your site. It's usually linked from a menu, or the footer of your site, and is often titled "Site Map" or "Important Pages". This is different from an XML Sitemap, which helps search engines find your content.
HTML sitemaps are useful because they help users find web pages they might not otherwise be able to find as easily. For example, a user can search for products on your site by clicking through categories and searching via keyword. But if they want to see all the products at once, this can be hard without an HTML sitemap. If you sell multiple product types across many categories, you can help users browse for items by providing links to all your products in one place.
Video Sitemaps
Google has no way of watching videos and understanding what they are about. For example, Google can't watch a training video and understand that the content is about "how to tie a bow tie". That's why it is crucial to provide Google with the right information about your videos. You can help Google by submitting a video sitemap.
Video Sitemaps help Google find, index, and rank your video content. The sitemap provides additional information about each video such as:
Title
Description
Publication date
Expiration date
Category
Image Sitemaps
Image Sitemaps can help search engines find your images even when they're outside the normal crawling process. Your site can also include images that are available through embedded video files. Google also supports a video sitemap format for video content.
To get the most out of Google Images, you can add a title and description to each image on your site using the "title" and "alt" tags. These tags show up in the source code of your page, but not in the visible webpage itself. The title and alt tags are also used when someone pins an image to Pinterest, so they're a great way to share information about your products with potential customers.
When you have a lot of pages on your site — especially if those pages have many images each — adding alt text can be time-consuming. In this case, consider adding structured data markup to all the images on your site, which allows Google Search and other applications to understand your images and their content better.
You can also provide structured data markup for individual recipes on a recipe site or articles on an article site. Once you've added this markup to all the important images on your site, you can submit an XML sitemap file containing URLs of these images.
How to create and submit a sitemap
To create your site map, you can use one of the following methods:
Manually: You can create a sitemap of your site manually by creating a text file that lists each URL on your site. You can then compress this list with gzip compression to create a sitemap file. For details, see the Sitemaps protocol specification and Creating a Sitemap for detailed instructions.
Use a third-party service: Many third-party services provide free or paid tools for sitemap creation, including XML-Sitemaps and G-Mapper.
What is the Index Status report?
The Index Status report provides information about the status of your indexed pages. The Index Status report is also accessible from the Google Search Console Home page.
This report shows the number of pages on your site that Google indexed during the period you selected. It also shows how many pages are currently in Google's index and how many pages are not currently in Google's index.
Experts at leadingDigital Marketing Agency in Mumbai will say that this data is useful to see how well your internal linking structure is working on your site or to see if some particular directories or subdirectories aren't being crawled as often as they should be.
The Index Status report is divided into four sections:
Indexed: How many of your site's pages have been indexed by search engines? When a page can't be crawled or isn't allowed to be crawled by search bots, it will show up as an error here.
Blocked: How many pages have been blocked from crawling by robots.txt files or meta tags.
Errors: Let's look at the number of broken links or 404-error pages on your site.
Removed: How many URLs have been removed from Google's index due to manual actions, malware, or other issues
What is a URL inspection tool?
A URL inspection tool can help you troubleshoot problems that might affect your website. Let's say you just launched a new website. When you try to access it, you get an error message. How do you know what the issue is? Is it related to your domain name, DNS settings, or hosting provider? Could it be a problem at the CDN (Content Delivery Network) level? Or maybe it's something else entirely?
A URL inspection tool can help you figure out the root cause of the issue by testing your website's health. It's especially useful if you don't know a single thing about computers and don't have any idea how to get anything done on your own.
What does a URL inspection tool do?
A URL inspection tool helps you find out whether there are any problems with your website's infrastructure or settings. It lets you:
Check if your domain name is resolving correctly.
Verify whether your nameservers are set up properly and pointing to DNS records that exist and contain valid information.
Determine if there are any issues with the servers that serve up your website content and whether they're returning the correct responses.
To make sure your site is secure, make sure that any SSL certificate or other security elements are in place.
You can use a URL inspection tool to test whether Googlebot can access a page on your site, how it renders the page, and whether any page resources (such as images or scripts) are blocked to Googlebot.
URL inspection tool with the URL www.example.com/page-1:
URL status The status of the URL in the live version of your site. This can be one of several values, such as "Valid", "Indexed", or "Not found".
URL details Information about the live version of the URL, such as last crawl date and HTTP response code.
Crawled date The last time that Google attempted to crawl this URL.
HTTP response code The HTTP response that Google received when trying to crawl this URL. Responses starting with 2xx indicate success; 4xx indicates the page was not found (404) or that access was denied (401); 5xx indicates a server error.
AMP status Whether a web page has an AMP version, and if so, whether it's valid according to the AMP validator. This information is only shown for pages that return 200 HTTP responses.
Conclusion
You can use site maps to improve navigation on your website and make it more visible to search engines. To get more information on how to submit your website for Google indexing, please visit our blog 3 Simple Steps to Submit Your Website for Google Indexing.