A sitemap is the file that contains the list of all the web pages in your website. It is with the help of xml sitemap that search engines navigate your whole website and find out all the web pages of your website and thus indexed or crawl into the search engine. In order to crawl your site in intelligent manner crawlers such as Googlebot read this file and thus indexed all the web pages. A simple example of the sitemap can be: /blog/post-sitemap.xml as you can find on our website as well.
A XML sitemap is quite a handful tool to properly navigate your website in the eyes of search engines. It can be really useful for you if you meet anyone of the following criteria:
Your Website contains lots of Pages: If you are regularly adding more pages to your site than xml sitemap automatically update your pages in the eyes of search engine and make them crawlable.
Your Website Pages are not properly inter-linked to each other: If your website pages are not properly linked to each other than they might lose the search engine presence. It is through xml sitemap that you really can make them indexable.
You Just Created Your Website and it has only few external links: A sitemap is also quite handful if you just created your website or blog and would like to index each of your page in search engines.
Your Website is using Rich media Content, Images or Videos: XML Sitemaps can also take additional information about the pages that contains rich media content, images or videos.
In addition, your sitemap can also provide search engines a notification about the valuable metadata that are associated with pages you list the xml sitemap: Metadata is the information about a particular page like as when the page was changed, how often you are updating the content of that page and other such related information.
How to Generate XML Sitemap for Search Engines
If you would like to generate xml sitemap for your website, you can visit any site that can generate the xml sitemap automatically such as: https://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ and paste the URL of your website as shown in the image below:
Click on Start generating sitemaps and the software will automatically provide you the list of sitemaps which you further can upload in the root file of your website…Once you generate the sitemap the next step is to submit the sitemap in the Google search console account and click on sitemap as shown in the below figure:
The next step is to click on the Add/Test Sitemap:
The last step is to copy and paste the XML Sitemap URL and thus click on Submit button in the Google Search Console and you are finish with XML Sitemap submission process.
