XML Sitemaps: What Are They?

Search engines and other data-munching programs like feed readers can consume XML files, which stand for Extensible Markup Language (XML).

Sitemap XMLs are documents that help Google and other major search engines better understand your website.

The URLs (pages) of a site are listed in a structured manner, which allows you (the webmaster) to include additional information about them.

Information such as:

1. The last time this page was updated
2. The frequency with which it changes
3. Relationship with other URLs on the site
4. Whether it is important to the overall site, etc.

Do You Need An XML Sitemap?

Sitemaps play an essential role in helping search engines index new content on your website. It allows site owners to inform search engines about changes and new additions directly. An XML sitemap can be an invitation to Google spiders to crawl and index new content on your website.

You must update your website frequently to maintain high rankings. By submitting your sitemap to Google, you can send a notification to Google about changes of your site. The search engine bots can quickly find you for crawling and indexing. Webmaster tools of Google provide some reports on the website with the use of its sitemap.

Free, Premium-Quality XML Sitemaps

You want your website to rank high in search engine results pages (SERPs), don't you?

Everyone does!

In order for your site to rank, search engines like Google must regularly crawl it.

In order to provide the most up-to-date content, they do this.

Search bots might crawl your site multiple times a day, especially if you post new articles throughout the day, as is the case with news sites.

Computer programs determine how often each site should be crawled by search bots as part of the crawl process.

Having these search engine spiders crawl your site more often leads to more of your content being indexed, which leads to more organic traffic going to your site.

The sitemap is what allows your site to be crawled "properly" everytime and more frequently as it were.

Using The Sitemap Generator, You Can Create A Road Map For Your Website

This document will provide a roadmap to the essential pages on your site for Googlebot to crawl. By creating an XML sitemap, you can ensure that Google sees all of your pages and crawls them.

With the help of XML sitemap creator, you can easily create a sitemap in order to aid search engine bots crawling your site more efficiently. It highlights all changes directly, such as removing old pages or adding new ones.

Sitemaps highlight the essential pages of a large website. You can quickly create a sitemap with this tool without installing or registering.

XML Sitemaps: Why Are They So Important?

In addition to listing pages accordingly, XML maps provide additional information about those pages, which helps search engines crawl your site more effectively.

In essence, a good Sitemap guides search engines to all the important pages of your website.

It is especially important to use XML if:

1. It seems that your site is not well-structured or well-linked (internal links).
2. There aren't many external links on your site since it's new.
3. On some eCommerce sites, some pages are dynamically generated.
4. It is a large site with lots of archived content that may not be well-linked. An example is a job board that has pages that get archived (and forgotten) over time.
5. It is just an average website, but you care about search engines indexing it properly.

The XML map can also be used for search engine optimization (SEO).

Google and other search engines can easily find important pages on your website even if your internal linking is poor.

Google and other search engines index and rank specific webpages, not entire websites.

Even if the search engines have already crawled and indexed your homepage, a properly defined sitemap will help them expose other pages that would otherwise be hidden.

Imagine your website as a house, and each page as a room. Google may know the house from the outside, but not necessarily every room within it.

Imagine an Sitemap as a blueprint of your house and its rooms. Google utilizes this blueprint to locate all the rooms in your house quickly and easily.

To establish you as the original source of content, Sitemaps can be very helpful if you publish a piece of content and it gets copied and published elsewhere.

Because an XML map helps Google crawl your site more quickly and more often, it will be able to find it first on your site. Summary: duplicate content issue resolved!

Our Sitemap Generator was created to help you create an XML for your website.

A Guide To Creating A Perfect Sitemap For Your Website

A sitemap generator can help you create free sitemaps for WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal. Here are some general guidelines:

1. You should use URLs that are fully qualified and consistent. For example, if a site at https://www.abc.com/ does not specify its URL as https://abc.com/ (without www) or ./mypage.html (a relative URL).
2. Sitemaps should not contain session IDs from URLs to reduce duplicate crawling. Use hreflang annotations to inform Google of alternate language versions. Ensure URLs are escaped and encoded appropriately in UTF-8.
3. An XML file of a sitemap must not contain more than 50,000 URLs and should not exceed 50 MB uncompressed. Make sure to break up large sitemaps into smaller ones to prevent overloading a server. Rather than submitting separate sitemaps to search engines, use an index file sitemap to list individual sitemaps.
4. Make sure to submit a sitemap to your favorite domain so that search engines know your website is accessible on non-www and www versions. If you have to point to both URLs, be sure to annotate URLs to indicate mobile and desktop versions. With sitemap extensions, it is easy to point to news, images, and videos.
5. If the URL of your sitemap contains upper ASCII characters or control codes, you will get an error message when adding it.

The XML Sitemap Generator: How To Use It

Auto SEO Tools' XML Sitemap Generator is a powerful tool, but just like any powerful tool, some training and background can go a long way.

Here are the exact steps you'll need to take to use the tool most efficiently:

1. The first step is to enter your website URL in the XML Sitemap Generator section.
2. The optional custom parameters include the number of pages to crawl, the change frequency, the default priority, and the dates.
3. After you have specified the parameters you want, click "Generate Sitemap". Using the details you provided, the tool will analyze your request, crawl your site, and generate a sitemap for you.
4. After the tool has completed the process, it will present you with the sitemap details, including the number of pages, broken links, and the XML file content.
5. Next, click on "Save As XML File" to download the sitemap file in .xml format.
6. You should then upload the sitemap.xml file to the root directory of your website. If you have multiple sitemaps, unzip the sitemap.zip file and upload all the sitemap files to the root directory.
7. Add your sitemap URL to your Google Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools) account as an additional step. Besides Google, our free online tool supports other major search engines as well. Adding it would just be a matter of going to your Bing Webmaster Tools account if you're a Bing user.

You can verify the XML file by submitting it to the search engines (via Google Search Console for Google). Ensure that the Sitemap is in the correct format and has been properly uploaded to your webserver before you attempt to verify it.

When you submit your Sitemap to Google, the search engine will discover and index your site sooner than it would otherwise.

In addition to our free online XML map creator, we also have other SEO tools you may find useful, including Page Speed Test, SEO Checker, and Website Broken Link Checker.

Are Sitemaps XML Good For SEO? (Add Your Site To Google)

The XML sitemap is good for SEOs. When you submit several pages to search engines for indexing, only a few of these pages are indexed. Search console of Google will not tell you about indexed pages. They will index the overall pages in each sitemap. For instance, you are running an e-commerce store. Your site has 100,000 products, 6,000 category pages, and 25,000 subcategory pages. You submit an XML sitemap of 131,000 and evaluate that Google is indexing only 95,000 of them.

Ensure you create a category-sitemap.xml and a subcategory-sitemap.xml. You are expecting almost 100% indexation. If you aren't getting 100% indexation, you know you need to add more content. Subcategories or categories of a product may not be indexed because of a single product. In this case, you can set noindex, and use Meta robots to pull them from an XML sitemap.