A sitemap allows search engines to easily navigate your website’s content. If you create a sitemap in WordPress, It will provide a list of all your content there.
Using a WordPress sitemap can bring a positive impact to your website. Creating one helps search engine bots to crawl and index your site more easily. Thus, it’ll improve your web pages’ visibility to search engines.
Using a WordPress sitemap can improve the performance of your website. Making one makes it easier for search engine bots to crawl and index your site. As a result, it will increase the visibility of your web pages in search engines.
In this post, we’ll define a sitemap and show you how to easily create one in WordPress.
What Exactly Is a WordPress Sitemap?
A sitemap is a list that directs both visitors and search engines to every page on a website that is accessible.
However, sitemaps are now even more important in terms of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Here are a few of the reasons why WordPress sitemaps are essential:
- Sitemaps notify search engines about changes to your website’s structure.
- They aid bots in crawling and indexing more quickly.
- It aids search engines in indexing large websites with a large number of pages that are not well-structured or interconnected.
Why You Should Create a Sitemap in WordPress?
A sitemap is a way for website owners to inform search engines about all of their website’s existing pages.
It also tells search engines which links on your website are more important than others, as well as how frequently you update it.
While sitemaps do not directly improve your search engine rankings, they do help search engines crawl your website more efficiently. This means that they will be able to find more content and begin displaying it in search results, potentially leading to higher rankings and increased traffic to your site.
Sitemaps are important from a search engine optimization (SEO) perspective.
With that said, simply adding a sitemap doesn’t affect search rankings. But if there’s a page on your site that’s not indexed, then a sitemap provides a way to let search engines know about that page.
WordPress Sitemap Differences Between XML and HTML
Sitemaps are classified into two types: XML and HTML.
XML – contains metadata as well as the website’s URLs and all of the information, such as when a specific URL was last updated and how frequently changes occur, and so on.
HTML – allows visitors to the website to navigate more easily. Specifies the location of pages such as Contact Us and Shopping Cart. It improves the usability of your site, which helps your search engine ranking.
The primary distinction between the two is that XML is written for search engines, whereas HTML sitemaps are written for website visitors.
Both WordPress sitemaps are recommended for your website. It ensures that you are not missing any important SEO elements, ensuring that your visitors have the best possible experience.
A sitemap aids in the quick indexing of web pages on new blogs with few backlinks. Let’s look at how to add both sitemaps to WordPress now!
How to Create a WordPress XML Sitemap.
Using a plugin is one of the simplest ways to generate an XML sitemap. Here are some of the best options available:
Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is a popular plugin for improving the SEO of WordPress websites. This plugin handles all technical aspects of content and allows you to track keyword density and readability. It can also help you create XML sitemaps.
- Yoast SEO can be found in the WordPress plugin directory.
- After activating the plugin, go to SEO -> General in your WordPress dashboard and click the Features tab.
- Click the On button to the right of XML sitemaps. Then, click the See the XML Sitemap link to generate your site’s XML sitemaps.
- You will be redirected to a page that contains a list of your sitemap URLs.
Google XML Sitemaps
This plugin makes it simple to generate a WordPress sitemap for a variety of search engines. It also has the ability to generate sitemaps for all WordPress pages and custom URLs. Furthermore, whenever new content is posted or published, it automatically notifies all major search engines.
After installing the plugin, navigate to Settings -> XML-Sitemap to access the configuration page. Your WordPress sitemap URL can be found here.
How to Make a WordPress HTML Sitemap Page?
You can now use the WP Sitemap Page plugin to create a sitemap in WordPress site by following these steps:
- Install and enable the plugin. Create a new page by going to Pages -> Add New.
- Add the following shortcode to the page where you want your HTML sitemap to appear.
[wp_sitemap_page]- When you’re finished, click Publish and go to its URL to view your HTML sitemap.
How Do I Submit XML Sitemaps for WordPress to Search Engines?
You can speed up indexing by submitting sitemaps or URLs, but the main goal is to improve the way your site is indexed and to correct errors after an incident. However, there are other places and reasons to submit your site that will indirectly help you rank in search engines.
We strongly recommend that you manually submit your website pages to search engines. However, because you submitted your page manually, there is no guarantee that it will be indexed by search engines. We use it to notify search engines that we have new content to share.
Visit our guidelines on different search engines site submissions post for step by step process.
How Can XML Sitemaps Help Your Website Grow?
Now that you’ve submitted your XML sitemap to Google, let’s look at how you can use it for your website.
To begin, keep in mind that the XML sitemap has no effect on your search rankings. It does, however, assist search engines in finding content, adjusting crawl rate, and improving your website’s visibility in search engines.
Keep an eye on your sitemap statistics in Google Search Console. It can display crawl errors as well as pages that have been excluded from search coverage.
Normally, Google will skip duplicate content, pages with no or very little content, and pages that have been excluded by your website’s robots.txt file or meta tags.
However, if you have a disproportionately large number of excluded pages, you should double-check your SEO plugin settings to ensure that you are not blocking any content.
Conclusion
See our complete Google Search Console guide for beginners for more information.
Sitemaps are useful for any website because their primary goal is to create a user-friendly website. They can also help you achieve a high ranking on search engine result pages and contribute to a faster crawl and indexing of your site.
