What is a sitemap and how to create it?

Many times you have seen an option at the bottom of many websites, in which it is written Sitemap. You might have a question that what’s this Sitemap. In today’s article, we are going to tell you what a Sitemap is and how to make it.

Until some time ago, there was an option of Sitemap on the home page of many government websites. Till some time ago, HTML was also used for Sitemap but as time and technology are changing, Sitemaps are now shown in XML on many websites.

What is a Sitemap?

In fact, Sitemap is a list of all the pages on any website, if we have not included the page of your website or blog in Sitemap, then no one can see those pages by going to Google’s search engine. Sitemaps are very important for every website or blog because, by this, any search engine gets information about the page available on your website or blog.

Apart from all this, Sitemap also provides information about the content on the blog or website you have created, how often you update the blog or website. Keeping these things in mind only your blog Appear in any search result.

Sitemap Types

By now we have come to know what a Sitemap is. Now we will get to know how many types of Sitemaps are there.

There are mainly two types of Sitemaps

• XML Sitemap
• HTML Sitemap

Now it becomes very important to know here that XML Sitemap also has two parts

• URL Sitemap
• Index Sitemap

After this we have to understand that URL Sitemap also has three parts

• Video Sitemap
• Sitemap for Webpages
• Image Sitemap

What is an XML Sitemap?

XML is generally a language, in which all information associated with that website is stored in a well-planned format. It is very difficult for us to understand XML, but this is not the case with search engines, but all search engines understand XML very easily. In simple language, we can also say that XML Sitemap is designed for search engines only, by which the search engine gets information about all internal and external resources of the website.

What is an HTML Sitemap?

As the name suggests, a Sitemap is like a map of any website, the HTML Sitemap contains the information of the website as well as its location. With the help of HTML Sitemap, one can get the information related to the website very easily. Just think that, on any website, there are many web pages and it is not easy for anyone to find the exact information from it but with the help of Sitemap, it becomes very easy.

Why is XML Sitemap needed?

If you look from SEO point of view, Sitemap is very important for every kind of website or blog, & nbsp. Although no ranking improves in the search engine of any website or blog due to Sitemap, if your web pages are not indexed yet, they get indexed through Sitemap.

Whenever you upload a new blog or article, there are not many backlinks in that blog, due to which they are not visible in the blog search engine but because of XML Sitemap, your blog or website gets indexed. After which any search engine can easily crawl those websites.

How do search engines find any Sitemap?

By now we have come to know that Sitemaps are the lifeblood of any website and this is how search engines display your website but now we will try to learn how a search engine finds a Sitemap.

Search engines are technically advanced. Whenever we post any new blog or article, through ping, the search engine gets information that there is some change in the Sitemap of the website.

How to make Sitemap?

XML Sitemap also contains metadata and these are the biggest advantage of XML Sitemap, due to which we can also provide additional information in the content of any web page. So let’s now know how to create an XML Sitemap

● First of all, you have to create a text file which will be renamed as Sitemap and save it in .xml format.
● After this we have to use the script below to let the search engine know how the Sitemap is encoded.

1. <?xml version=” 1.0″ encoding=” UTF-8″?>
2. <urlset xmlns=”http://sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″>
3. </urlset>

● Now we have to add all the URLs on the website.

1. <url>
2. <loc>http://www.website.com/</loc>
3. <lastmod>2021-01-01</lastmod>
4. <changefreq>daily</changefreq>
5. <priority>1</priority>
6. </url>

You should add your URL to the tags mentioned above. The lastmod that is written after that means that the last time you modified your page. After that, there are changefreq which means in what interval do you change your page such as Hourly, Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Yearly etc.

If your URLs have been archived, then use never in frequency. After that the next steps are those of priority, it depends on you in which category you want to put your page. Here 1 means more important. Its range is from 0.0 to 1.0 while by default is 0.5.

● After creating a Sitemap, you have to upload it to your website and should only add it by going to the Root Directory.

What to keep in mind when creating a Sitemap?

When you are creating a Sitemap, you must keep some things in mind, let’s know what those things are.

● The maximum length of any URL you create must be up to 2048 characters.
● You can only have up to 50,000 URLs in one Sitemap.
● You also have to keep in mind that all URLs must be from the same host as the Sitemap.
● You can keep the maximum file size of any Sitemap up to 50 MB only.