Sitemaps are one of the most important parts of SEO.

They help:

  • Search engines find pages on your website
  • Your website rank better

Because search engines like Google can quickly find new pages and updates to old pages.

Sitemaps can be overwhelming and technical to understand.

So, in this article we will learn:

  • What Sitemaps are
  • How to create Sitemaps
  • How to submit Sitemaps to Google
  • All the best practices for Sitemaps

Let’s dive right in.

What is a Sitemap?

A Sitemap is a file of information about your website:

  • Pages
  • Videos
  • Images
  • Other files

Sitemaps are important because:

  • They are maps for search engines like Google to find and understand your content
  • They help search engine bots crawl and index your website’s web pages
  • They help search engines identify new web pages and updates to old web pages
  • They help search engines find alternative language versions of your web pages

But there are two types of sitemap formats:

  • HTML
  • XML

HTML sitemaps:

  • Users can see and use to navigate your website
  • Referred to as your “website archive”
  • Marketers view HTML sitemaps as outdated or unnecessary

XML sitemaps:

  • Manually submitted
  • Used for indexing and crawling your website
  • A modern way of handling how your website’s content is stored

HTML sitemaps help users find pages on your website, but internal linking does too.

So for SEO, focus on XML sitemaps.

Sitemap Types

HTML and XML sitemaps also have subsections:

Page Sitemap

A page sitemap, also known as a regular sitemap, improves page and post indexing.

A page sitemap can include images and videos on each page for websites not focused on images or videos, like photography and videography websites.

An example of a page sitemap without an image is:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″?>

<urlset xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″ >

  <url>

    <loc>https://example.co.uk/</loc>

    <lastmod>2021-09-14</lastmod>

    <changefreq>daily</changefreq>

    <priority>0.9</priority>

   </url>

</urlset>

Basically:

  • <loc> tags includes your URLs
  • <lastmod> is when the page was last edited
  • <changefreq> is how frequently the page is edited
  • <priority> is how important the page is to other pages on the website

For more parameter information, look at Sitemaps XML format.

Video Sitemap

An XML video sitemap focuses on video content.

They are necessary if videos are important to your business.

If not, save your crawl budget and add the video link to your page sitemap.

Note: Your crawl budget is the limited number of web pages that can be crawled on your website, at one time.

News Sitemap

A news sitemap is needed:

  • If you publish news
  • Want to get news articles on top stories and Google News

Just remember:

Image Sitemap

Only use image sitemaps if images are important to your business, like a photography or stock photo website.

If not, put them in your page sitemap and mark them up with the image object schema.

Then, they will be crawled with the page content/URL.

An example of an image sitemap looks like this:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″?>

<urlset xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″ xmlns:image=”http://www.google.co.uk/schemas/sitemap-image/1.1″ >

  <url>

    <loc>https://example.co.uk/</loc>

       <image:image>

<image:loc>https://example.co.uk/image-url.png</image:loc>

       </image:image>

      <image:image>

<image:loc>https://example.co.uk/second-image-url.png</image:loc>

      </image:image>

  </url>

</urlset>

Sitemap Index

Limits for sitemaps include:

  • Too many URLs causes no indexation of some of your web pages
  • All sitemaps, but news sitemap, have 50,000 URLs max
  • News sitemaps, have 1000 URLs max
  • A sitemap should have 50MB max uncompressed file size

Consider more than one sitemap because of limitations.

An index file is needed to list more than one sitemap file.

And the index file should be submitted to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.

XML Sitemap Hint

Most websites only need the page sitemap to include images on each page.

Sitemap Priorities

Adding priorities to your sitemap is what people do highlight important pages but Google ignores these priorities.

Instead:

  • Be honest about when your content was modified
  • Include this information in your sitemap

Doing this will help search engines like Google to:

  • Re-crawl the modified page
  • Index the new content

Creating a Sitemap

Now lets learn how to create a sitemap without using a generator or plugin.

The next section will go over using a generator or if your website is on WordPress.

Follow these steps to manually create a sitemap:

Pick the pages you want Google to crawl and each pages canonical version

Canonical versions are needed for duplicate pages.

For example, having pages based on location with the same language and content for an international audience, like:

  • example.com/us/page for US visitors
  • example.com/ca/page for Canada visitors

So, it’s important to point to the original, example.com/page or one of the two as the canonical.

And remember don’t include pages search bots can’t crawl, like:

  • URLs blocked by robots.txt files
  • Pages requiring a login to access
  • Password protected pages

Adding them causes coverage errors in Google Search Console.

Decide if more than one sitemap will do

Several websites use separate files for pages, posts, and categories. Remember that if you have more than 50,000 URLs, you need multiple sitemaps.

Code your URLs in XML tags to the type of sitemap you want

For more details click on this page which explains how to use XML tags.

For multiple sitemap files, create a sitemap index file and add links to the individual sitemaps

Go back to the “Sitemap Index” section for an explanation.

Sitemap Generators

If you don’t have a web development background, use a sitemap generator to save yourself looking through complex coding.

The sitemap generators you can use include:

  • TechnicalSEO by Merkle to upload a CSV file with your URLs:
    • Great for different language versions of your pages, also hreflang tags
    • For custom-coded websites not on a CMS or builder that generates sitemaps
  • Screaming Frog SEO Spider to use with simple custom-built sites:
    • Use the spider mode
    • Click on “Mode”
    • Then “spider”
    • And type your home page’s URL and crawl
    • When done, click on “Sitemaps”

On ScreamingFrog, to save the XML file on your computer:

  • Tick the options for your site
  • Click “export”
  • Then, upload the file to your server in the root directory

These tools don’t automatically update the sitemap file.

But premium tools do and charge for this service.

The above steps aren’t needed if your website is on:

  • WordPress
  • an ecommerce platform like Shopify

For WordPress, SEO plugins generate sitemaps and update as you edit posts or pages like:

And Shopify automatically generates sitemaps.

Submitting Sitemaps to Google

Submit your sitemap through Google Search Console (GSC). 

This is the most common method:

  • Go to Google Search Console
  • Click on “sitemap”
  • Type your sitemap URL
  • Click Submit

Note: For multiple sitemaps with a sitemap index file, only type the URL for the index file.

Not submitted your site to GSC?

Let Google know you have one and add the following to your robots.txt:

  • Sitemap: http://example.co.uk/sitemap.xml

But replace the example URL with the one you have.

And include your index file here, if you have one.

Not using GSC?

Use the ping service to let Google know to crawl your file.

Type this URL in your browser:

  • http://www.google.com/ping?sitemap=https://example.com/sitemap.xml

Replace:

  • https://example.com/sitemap.xml

With:

  • Your sitemap URL

And, that’s it, you’re done.

Best Practices for Sitemaps

Now follow these best practices for Sitemaps:

Use tools to automatically generate sitemaps

Manually creating and updating an XML sitemap takes time and is complex.

Instead, use an automatic sitemap generator.

The WordPress generators mentioned above do it for free.

Custom-built websites have to pay, but it’s worth it.

Regularly do sitemap maintenance checks and updates

SEO is ongoing, so it’s good to regularly check your sitemaps.

Search console informs you of crawling or indexing issues with your submitted URLs.

So regularly check:

  • GSC’s ‘Coverage’ section
  • Update your website or sitemap when errors occur

This section tells you the exact error and gives suggestions to fix it.

Alternatively, for sitemap maintenance you can use Screaming Frog.

After your website or sitemap URL have been crawled, click the response code tab and check for:

  • 404 errors
  • 5xx errors

Remember to regularly update automatic sitemap generator tools or plugins.

Also, view the sitemap via your sitemap URL and check for missing pages or if last updated times are correct.

Prioritise high-quality pages in your sitemap

Google says it doesn’t pay attention to the priority tag.

But Bing might, so it’s good to prioritise high-quality pages in your sitemap.

Sitemap priority shows which web pages should be crawled and indexed quicker.

So, set priorities with values from 0.00 to 1.00.

But don’t use the same value for all pages or Google won’t know which is the most important.

Examples of values used on web pages could be:

  • The homepage – 1.00
  • The main landing pages – 0.90
  • Other landing pages – 0.85
  • The main links on the navigation bar – 0.80
  • Other pages on the website – 0.75
  • Top articles or blog posts such as hub pages – 0.80
  • Blog category pages – 0.75
  • Other posts – 0.64

Only add canonical versions of URLs in your sitemap

Only include URLs you want search engines to index in your sitemap.

If a URL points to another URL as its canonical version, don’t add it, because it tells search engines like Google not to index that URL.

If that URL is in your sitemap it gives Goole conflicting information and it could:

  • Get that URL indexed
  • You will get coverage errors in GSC

Split large sitemaps

If your sitemap files are over 50MB or have more than 50,000 URLs, then split your sitemap into multiple files.

If you submit large XML files to Google, some URLs won’t be indexed.

Note: Save each file with easy to understand names like:

  • page_sitemap1.xml
  • page_sitemap2.xml

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