What is sitemap? How to create Sitemap & 13 Tips to optimize Sitemap for website

What is sitemap? It is an important part of technical SEO optimization for any website. This is an effective weapon to help you SEO more effectively. So what exactly is a Sitemap? How to create a Sitemap for a website?

Let's find out with GTV SEO through this article with the instructions below!

What is sitemap?

Sitemap (Website map) is a file that lists information about other pages and files on the Website. This map helps search engines find, crawl, and index (Index) your Web content.

What is the concept of Sitemap?

In terms of structure: There are 2 types of Sitemaps, which are XML (for search engine bots) and HTML (displaying information for easy access by users on the web), and some other types of Sitemaps. You should use both of these Sitemaps for Search Engines and users.

In addition, Sitemap also helps search engines identify important pages in your website maps. From there, the function gives much smarter search results.

Why is Sitemap important?

Search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing use Sitemaps to find different pages on your website.

Sitemap plays a very important role

As Google reported:

“If your site is properly linked, our web crawler function can usually discover most of the pages of your website”

In other words: You don't need a Sitemap. But if you have, it certainly won't hurt your SEO efforts.

However, there are also many special cases where Sitemaps are really useful.

For example, Google often finds subpages through links. If your site is new and doesn't have a lot of external backlinks, then Sitemap will make a huge contribution to boosting Google's search process and getting your site up in the search results.

Another example: Users are looking for information related to images, videos, but Google's tools can't find your page because the content is not clear?

Or maybe you run an e-commerce site with 5 million subpages hosted within the website. Unless you have PERFECT internal linking and lots of external links, Google will have a hard time finding all of them. That's when we need Sitemap.

Thus, Sitemap is not harmful, but it also helps your SEO process more effectively. Then why not use Sitemap right?

Types of Sitemaps you need to know 

There are two commonly used ways to distinguish different types of Sitemaps:

Sort by structure

According to the structure, there are 2 types of Sitemap: XML and HTML.

1. XML Sitemap: created to help search engine bots crawl your website easily and quickly.

Example: XML Sitemap of gtvseo.com

2. HTML Sitemap: was created to help users easily find and access resources on the website thanks to the friendliness and convenience in the interface design. You can improve website ranking by optimizing user experience (User Experience) on HTML Sitemap page.

Example: HTML Sitemap of Apple Website

So should you use XML or HTML Sitemap? This question is quite controversial, but the correct answer is to use both. Because SEO needs to balance between two parties: users and search engine bots. Therefore, using both types of Sitemap above is the best way you need to do.

Sort by format

According to the format, Sitemap has 4 main types as follows:

1. Image Sitemap: Image Sitemap contains information related to images stored on websites. Use this Sitemap to optimize Google's ability to return visual results.

2. Video Sitemap: This is a diagram containing aggregated information, related to the videos located on your website. Google will need this type of Sitemap to collect data that normal aggregation cannot meet.

3. News Sitemap: This sitemap allows you to control the content sent to Google News. This news map will help Google News find new content in your website faster.

4. Mobile Sitemap : This type of Sitemap is only really necessary when your website has pages that display on mobile devices. According to John Muller, even if you create a Mobile Sitemap, it will not help increase the Mobile-Friendly score for your website.

There are also different types of Site maps such as: Sitemap Index, Sitemap-category.xml, Sitemap-products.xml, Sitemap-articles.xml, Sitemap-tags.xml,..

Which sites need an XML Sitemap?

In google's document, this giant revealed that XML Sitemap is very beneficial for websites:

• Big or very big

• Has a large archive

• Only a few external links

• Use rich multimedia content: images, videos, etc.

In fact, these types of websites will certainly benefit greatly from XML Sitemaps. But that doesn't mean other sites won't benefit from this type of scheme.

Every website needs Google to be easily displayed on the search results page. Through the Sitemap, Google will be able to find important pages and see when they were last updated. 

So which pages need to use XML Sitemap?

How do you decide which pages should be included in the XML Sitemap? 

Let's start by thinking about the relevancy of a particular URL:

When a visitor arrives at this URL, does it give you the results you want? Do you want visitors to this URL?

If not, you probably won't want it in your XML Sitemap. A little tip here, if you don't want the URL to show up in the search results, add the tag 'noindex, follow'. This will prevent Google from indexing that URL.

Instructions on how to create a Sitemap for a website

Does your website use Wordpress or don't use Wordpress? To avoid wasting time, choose the most appropriate part of the guide below:

1. Sitemap for Wordpress website

2. With Yoast SEO

3. Google XML Sitemaps

4. Create SiteMap Online at XML-Sitemaps.com for non-Wordpress websites

5. How to view the Sitemap of a website after creating it

Create Sitemap for Wordpress website

Case: If you already have a WordPress account, you can use WordPress to create a Sitemap.

You can choose from plugins like Google XML Sitemaps or external plugins like Yoast SEO or whatever you feel is functional and easy to use.

What to prepare?

First, you need to access the WordPress admin page:

Proceed to login to WordPress, type the domain name and add /wp-admin .

For example, your WordPress website is xyz.com , you need to access admin by URL: xyz.com/wp-admin .

After accessing, you need to log in with your account name and password.

Create Sitemap with Yoast SEO

For the process of creating sitemaps with Yoast is very easy to do. You just need to follow the steps I guide below.

Let's start with deciding what sitemap the website will index. Then is to review each content.

Step 1: Log in to your WordPress website and open the XML sitemap in another tab.

Step 2: Start Yoast installation at Content Types . In the left menu of your WordPress website, hover over the Yoast SEO plugin, then click on Search Appearance .

Note: drop-down menus on the Content Type, Taxonomies, and Archives Tabs tabs. Each menu opens a panel to help you optimize the specific content that appears in search results.

Start installing Yoast

Each drop-down menu also includes a toggle that allows adding or removing content from the XML sitemap. Yoast will ask a simple question: “Show (individual sitemap) in search results?”

Add or remove a piece of content from the XML sitemap

Step 3: In this step we will work with the Taxonomies and Archives tabs in the Search interface of the Yoast SEO plugin.

Here you can display Categories and Tags. Next optimize the taxon so that they are more valuable to search engines.

Step 4: Customize the sitemap. Open XML Sitemap Index. Click on the website sitemap to open a new tab.

Objective: is to evaluate the pages in each Sitemap. Go through each website sitemap, each URL, and you should ask yourself if each piece of content is beneficial to the user.

If you see pages like /hello-world or /testing-123 they may be of low value to search engines, open each page in a new tab for a page-level assessment. If they do not contain content of value to the user, you should exclude those pages from the sitemap.

To exclude individual URLs from the XML sitemap, click “ Edit Page ” at the top of each page or post you want to exclude.

In the page editor, scroll down to Metabox Yoast SEO. Click on the gear icon “ Advanced Settings ” and set “ Allow search engines to show this Page in search results? ” to “ No ”.

You can still allow search engines to follow links on that page – even if it is hidden – by setting “ Should search engines follow links on this Page? ” set to “ Yes ”.

Set this value to “ Yes ” when you do not want crawlers to follow direct links on the page.

Finally, click on “ Update ” in the top right corner of the page to save these settings. Repeat this process for each site you want to exclude from each Sitemap.

Create Sitemap with Google XML Sitemaps

In case you do not use or do not want to use Yoast SEO to create Sitemaps, the Google XML Sitemaps Plugin is the best alternative that you need to consider.

Step 1: Install and activate the Google XML Sitemaps Plugin

Immediately after activation, this plugin will automatically generate XML Sitemap for your website. You can view your Sitemap by adding sitemap.xml to the end of the website address.

Example: https://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

Check Sitemap

Step 2: Install the plugin's configuration.

This plugin works well for most blogs and websites. However, you still need to review the settings to tweak the parameters to suit your SEO strategy, and make sure you don't miss anything.

Simply, go to Settings » XML-Sitemap to reset the plugin's configuration.

Go to Settings » XML-Sitemap to reset configuration

At the top of the figure, Google XML Sitemaps will show you a snippet of the status update. This plugin will notify you in case it cannot ping your Sitemap to a certain search engine.

If you find it annoying, you can turn off the notification feature in the general settings. This increases the PHP memory limit and much more.

Next, you will see the Additional Pages section . Here you can manually add the page to the XML Sitemap. This is useful if your site contains static HTML pages.

Add Pages to XML Sitemap

You can then customize the priority for the post URLs. Google XML Sitemaps will use the comment count by default to calculate URL priority.

Customize priority for article URLs

The next two sections of the plugin installer will allow you to include or exclude a few unwanted pages from the WordPress Sitemap. For example, if you are running an e-commerce website, then you will definitely have to include product pages in your Sitemap.

Choose to include or exclude some unwanted pages from the WordPress Sitemap.

Then you can adjust the frequency (Frequency) and priority (Priority) of the Sitemap Content. Changing these values ​​is considered a suggestion by search engines. Search engine bots can choose to consider or ignore these values ​​based on their own criteria.

Adjust the frequency (Frequency) and priority (Priority) of Sitemap Content

Finally, don't forget to click the Update Options button to save your changes.

Create an Online Sitemap at XML-Sitemaps.com

Case: Don't use WordPress?

Do not worry. If you do not use WordPress, you can completely create an Online Sitemap through the XML-Sitemaps.com tool . It will generate an XML file that you can apply to your Sitemap.

Create SiteMap using XML-Sitemaps.com tool

You just need to follow 5 simple steps as follows:

Step 1: Click the link: http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

Step 2: Fill in the required parameters.

The information you need to fill in is as follows:

• Starting URL: Type your website address in

• Change Frequency: Should be selected as daily (you can choose the appropriate parameters)

• Last Modification: Should choose Use Server's Response

• Priority: Should be automatic (Automatically Calculated Priority)

When you complete all the information, click on the Start command and wait. When finished, you will receive a list of Sitemap files (contents to pay attention to: sitemap.xml, ror.xml, sitemap.html and urllist.txt)

Step 3: Download the XML file.

Use Notepad++ to open the sitemap.xml file to set the Priority parameters for the urls according to your wishes.

Note: The Priority parameter specifies the importance of urls for the website, if any Url is important, it should be given the highest score, the highest is 1.0 and the lowest is 0.10.

Step 4: Upload the XML file to the website.

Step 5: Go to Google Webmaster Tools SEO Tool to update Sitemap.

How to view the Sitemap of a website after creating it

After you have created the Sitemap, you can proceed to view the Sitemap of your website manually.

View Sitemap after creating

(The sitemap is usually located at site.com/Sitemap.xml. But sometimes it depends on the CMS and the type of program you use to create the Sitemap.)

Sitemap will display all the URLs of the pages on your website.

Sitemap will show all URLs

13 Sitemap optimization tips to promote SEO in 20 seconds

Sitemap optimization tips

Creating a Sitemap is an important part of optimizing any website.

As mentioned in the previous sections, Sitemaps are especially important for websites whose archived content is not linked together, lacks external links, and contains many subpages (hundreds, even thousands of pages).

Sitemaps not only provide search engines with detailed information about how your site is laid out, but can also include valuable data such as:

• Frequency of page updates

• When the page is changed

• The importance of each page and the relationship between the pages

So how to optimize Sitemap? Let's find out 13 Tips to optimize Sitemap website to promote SEO below:

1. Use plugin tool to create Sitemap automatically

Creating a Sitemap is easy when you have the right tools. As mentioned in the Sitemap creation section, we can use software or plugins like Google XML Sitemaps, Yoast SEO to create Sitemaps quickly.

Alternatively, you can create a sitemap manually by following the Sitemap XML code structure. In fact, your Sitemap doesn't need to be in XML format. You can use normal text file and split each URL line by line is enough.

However, you still need to create a complete XML Sitemap if you want to implement the hreflang attribute. Sounds pretty troublesome right?

So, if you are new, use the automatic Sitemap generator to do these things. This will save you a lot of time and effort.

You can visit this link for more information on how to set up Sitemap manually.

2. Declare your Sitemap to Google

Just like Submit URL, Sitemap can be declared to Google through Google Search Console . From the main interface, select Crawl > Sitemaps > Add Test Sitemap

Remember to check your Sitemap and see the results before you click the Submit Sitemap button. The purpose of this is to check for possible errors. They will affect Google's indexing of landing pages.

Normally, all users want their submitted pages to be indexed. However, not all will be approved by Google.

Submitting a Sitemap tells Google which pages you consider high quality and worthy of indexing. But that does not guarantee that they will be indexed by Google.

Instead, the benefits of submitting your sitemap are:

• Help Google understand how your site is presented.

• Detect errors you can fix to ensure your pages are properly indexed.

3. Prioritize high quality pages in Sitemap

Website quality is an important factor. It directly affects the ranking of Google search results. Therefore, if your Sitemap has too many unstable quality pages, it will affect the entire website.

From there, the search engines will consider your website low quality. Therefore, try to direct bots to the most important pages of the website. These pages should have the following characteristics:

• Highly optimized

• Contains images or videos

• There are specialized content

• Involve users through: comments or reviews (reviews)

4. Indexing Issues

As mentioned in the previous section, google does not index all the pages that you place in the Sitemap. Previously, Google Search Console didn't even notify you of pages with indexing problems. 

For example, if you submit 20,000 pages and only 15,000 of them are indexed, you won't be told which 5,000 "problem pages" are and what the problem is.

At that time, managers had to split these pages into different Sitemaps for testing. Then remove those URLs that are not indexed so that your website is appreciated by Google.

However, that is only in the past, now Google Search Console has updated its Index Coverage . Error URLs will be listed by Google.

5. Put the canonical version of the URL in the Sitemap

If your website has many very similar pages, such as different colored product pages (within 1 product). You can use the tag ' link rel=canonical ' to let Google know which page is the 'main' page.

When you put the canonical version in your Sitemap, you'll make it easier for bots to find the main page. From there Google can crawl and index faster.

6. Use Robots Meta tag instead of Robots.txt 

As mentioned above, if you want to remove a page from the indexing list, you have the right to use the 'noindex,follow' tag. This tag is also known as meta robots

Placing a tag will help keep the URL from falling into the index. But still preserve the link value. This is especially useful for website utility pages: important, but should not show up in search results.

You should only use robots.txt when you want to completely block some unimportant pages to minimize loss when you run out of budget.

In other cases, when you find that Google is re-crawling and indexing relatively unimportant pages (e.g. individual product pages) at the expense of the main pages, you can think about using robots.txt.

7. Do not include 'noindex' URL in Sitemap

Once you don't want bots to crawl and index a certain URL, it's best to remove it from the Sitemap. 

Putting non-important pages in the same place as important pages shows inconsistency.

Please only put the URLs that you want indexed into the Sitemap.

8. Create Dynamic XML Sitemaps for Large Websites

It is completely impossible to control each URL in the Sitemap of large websites. Instead, you should establish rules to determine when a page should be included in the XML Sitemap, or change from 'noindex' to "index, follow."

You can find a suitable tool to quickly generate dynamic XML Sitemap.

9. Using XML Sitemaps and RSS/Atom Feeds

RSS/Atom feeds is an XML form that creates a summary channel for information. 

RSS has the role of notifying search engines every time your site is updated or has new content. From there, Google or Bing will always keep the latest information from your website.

Google recommends using both Sitemaps and RSS/Atom Feeds to help search engines understand which pages should be indexed and updated.

By including only the most up-to-date content in your RSS/Atom Feeds, you'll make finding new content a lot easier for both search engines and visitors.

10. Update the revision time only when there is an important change

Don't try to trick bots into re-indexing pages with modification time updates without actually making any significant changes.

Google may remove your publishing date entirely if they find that pages in your website are constantly being updated without any new value added. 

So, only update the revision times when you actually make changes to these pages.

11. Don't worry too much about priority setting

Some Sitemaps will have a Priority column . They have the function of telling bots which pages are the most important. However, the functionality of this feature has not been confirmed yet

In fact, some users have posted on Twitter that the Google bot ignored these 'priorities' when crawling.

Set crawl priority

12. Keep the file size as small as possible

The smaller the Sitemap size, the less pressure on the server will be.

Although Google and Bing both increased the maximum sitemap file size for webites from 10MB to 50MB in 2016. But you should still keep your Sitemap as neat as possible to prioritize your main landing pages.

13. Create multiple Sitemaps if the website contains more than 50,000 URLs

Each Sitemap can only contain a maximum of 50,000 URLs .

This number is more than enough for most websites in Vietnam. However, if your website has more URLs than this number, don't worry. You can completely create different Sitemaps to contain these URLs.

Case study of GTV about Sitemap

It's not too serious, when my client's website has a Sitemap error due to a conflict between the Yoast SEO Plugin and other sitemap creation Plugins. 

And you know, sitemap errors won't affect you too quickly for you to notice, but they will slowly. The conflict period was determined by me as January, but it was not until April that the website began to "slowly decline" and the growth rate was quite slow. At that time, I thought it was Google's algorithm update so I didn't carefully check the Sitemap.

It wasn't until the beginning of July that I audited the overall website (3 months GTV will audit the overall project once) and discovered an error about this Sitemap.

At that time, I messaged the code team to fix the conflicts and resubmit the Sitemap. The situation changed when the traffic and top increased first again (though not too fast).

Sitemap error is one of many technical SEO errors (Technical SEO errors) so its influence is not too much. However, if you do not carefully create and Submit Sitemap, this is probably the problem that makes your website unable to grow significantly.

Below is a picture of the website growing in terms of traffic as well as the top of the project:

Growth image when submitting the measured Sitemap on Google Analytics

Next is Google Search Console

You see, the sitemap error caused the website to be downgraded very strongly in early May - Google's core update. The website is now stable and growing again. 

Conclude

Sitemap is a tool that brings significant benefits and functionality to the SEO process. It supports bots, helping Google find your website articles easily and quickly. From there, optimize the visibility of the website on the SERPs. 

This is an effective support tool for improving website visibility. Hopefully this article with this guide to what is a sitemap will help you better understand what a sitemap is and how to use them. Good luck!

#gtvseo #gtv_seo #sitemap_la_gi

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