For every digital marketing professional, either beginners or professionals, the importance of sitemaps for search engine optimization will be well-known. A good sitemap can improve the website ranking and organic traffic. So, what is a sitemap and how is it included in a website? A sitemap or XML sitemap includes the list of all web pages of a website. Search engines like Google use site crawlers to read, organize, and index relevant results for the given search query. Sitemap, which lists all your web pages will help search engine crawlers easily read your webpage content and rank it accordingly. 

How does a sitemap boost your website ranking? With a sitemap, the search engine will receive details like when the page is last modified, the frequency of updates, and the relation between essential pages with others. It is a really important and valuable investment for your website that improves the browser convenience to access your website and thereby increases your search engine ranking and organic traffic. XML and HTML are the main types of sitemaps used. Among these, XML sitemaps are intended for browsers and this won’t be visible to website users. But, HTML sitemaps are included in your website and it lists all the important pages of your website and will improve the convenience of users to find any information. XML image sitemap, XML video sitemap, Google news sitemap, mobile sitemaps, and dynamic XML sitemap are other types of sitemaps. In a sitemap, the content will be organized in a hierarchy that contains high-priority content on top and low-priority content on the bottom.

So, what are the purposes of sitemaps? As mentioned earlier, the first and most important goal of a sitemap is to prioritize the pages according to different parameters and index these pages. Another feature is to enable the browser to scan media content and the news feed of the website. For a website, the sitemap is mandatory when the site is really large and includes a large archive of content pages or rich media content. 

Tips for Perfect Sitemap Generation

• Utilize tools and plugins for automatic sitemap generation.
• With the Google Search console, submit the sitemap to Google (Crawl > Sitemaps > Add Test Sitemap)
• Only include Canonical URL’s with status code 200
• Include sitemap details in Robots.txt
• The sitemap size should not be larger than 50Mb and it must never contain more than 50,000 URL’s
• List high-quality pages in sitemap which highly optimized and include unique content, contain images/videos, and that prompt user engagement through reviews/comments.
• Eliminate duplicate pages by listing canonical URLs in the sitemap.
• Don’t insert “no-index” URLs in the sitemap
• Divide larger sitemap into multiple sitemaps and prevent indexing problems.