Making sure your website has a sitemap and submitting it to search engines like Google is really important for improving your SEO. It helps search engines find and understand your content better, so they can show it to people searching for information like yours.
Here's how a sitemap enhances your SEO:
Ensures Search Engines Crawl Your Content
A sitemap is like a roadmap for your website, showing all the important pages to search engines so they can explore and index them easily. It's super helpful for:
Large websites: It helps ensure all pages are indexed, including those deep within your site’s structure.
New websites: Google may not know about your new content right away, and a sitemap speeds up the discovery process.
Websites with complex navigation: If your site structure is complex or includes a lot of media-rich content, a sitemap ensures that important pages aren’t overlooked.
2. Helps Index Pages That Aren't Easily Found
It's possible that some pages might be hard for search engines to find because of certain factors, such as:
Lack of internal or external links.
Being buried deep in the site’s hierarchy.
Pages dynamically generated via JavaScript or AJAX.
Make sure to include all pages in the sitemap, even the ones that are not easily accessible through the regular paths that web crawlers take. This way, you can ensure that important but hidden pages are discovered and indexed.
3. Signals Priority and Update Frequency
In the sitemap, you have the opportunity to include more information about each page, like:
Priority: Assigning priority to certain pages (e.g., homepage, main services) indicates their relative importance.
Update frequency: Letting search engines know how often your content changes (e.g., daily for news sites, monthly for blogs) helps Google revisit and re-crawl content at appropriate intervals.
These signals are important because they help make sure that search engines pay attention to the most important or frequently updated pages.
4. Improves Crawl Efficiency
"Search engines have a crawl budget for each site, which is the number of pages they will crawl within a specific time frame. A sitemap helps search engines use their crawl budget efficiently by:"
Directing them to essential pages first.
Avoiding duplicate content or unnecessary crawls of pages that don’t contribute to SEO (like archive pages or tag pages).
Helping them prioritize high-quality pages and fresh content.
5. Supports Rich Media and Multilingual Content
Sitemaps can also include information beyond basic page URLs:
Image sitemaps: Help search engines index important images (e.g., product images, infographics) for improved visibility in search results.
Video sitemaps: Allow search engines to properly index videos embedded on your site, improving your chances of appearing in video search results.
Hreflang tags: Indicate different language or regional versions of a page, helping search engines serve the right content to the appropriate audience.
6. Ensures Google Discovers New Content Quickly
When you submit a sitemap, you're letting Google know right away about your new content or updates. This is much quicker than waiting for search engines to find your site on their own, which can take a while.
Expedites the process of discovery and indexing.
Increases the chances of new pages ranking sooner.
7. Helps in Resolving Indexing Issues
Using a sitemap helps to identify potential indexing issues through tools such as Google Search Console. When you submit a sitemap, Google provides feedback on:
Pages that couldn’t be crawled.
Duplicate content.
Errors related to specific URLs, like server issues or redirects.
This allows you to troubleshoot and fix problems that could otherwise negatively impact SEO.
8. Boosts SEO for Non-Linked Pages
Make sure to remember the following information:
If some pages don't have links either within the website or from other websites (which are important signals for search engines to find and rank pages), they might not show up in search results. A sitemap helps by giving search engines a direct way to find and understand these pages.
But HOW DO I CREATE A SITEMAP AND SUBMIT IT TO GOOGLE?
We got you covered. Here are the steps to submit a sitemap to Google:
Step 1: Create a Sitemap
If you haven't created a sitemap yet, you can do so using tools like:
Yoast SEO Plugin (for WordPress)
XML Sitemap Generator (for non-WordPress sites)
Squarespace, Wix, Shopify often have built-in sitemap generation.
A sitemap URL usually looks like this: https://www.example.com/sitemap.xml
Step 2: Add Your Site to Google Search Console
If you haven't already added your site to Google Search Console, follow these steps:
Go to Google Search Console.
Click Start Now and sign in with your Google account.
In the left-hand menu, click Add Property.
Enter your website’s URL and follow the verification steps to prove ownership of your site.
Step 3: Submit the Sitemap
Once your site is verified, follow these steps to submit your sitemap:
Go to your Google Search Console dashboard.
In the left-hand menu, click on Sitemaps under the Index section.
In the “Add a new sitemap” field, enter the URL of your sitemap (e.g., sitemap.xml).
Click Submit.
Step 4: Check the Status
After submitting, Google will start crawling your sitemap. You can monitor the status in the Sitemaps section of Google Search Console, where you'll see details about errors or pages indexed.
Tips:
Ensure your sitemap is updated regularly.
Only submit one sitemap per site.
Review the "Coverage" report in Search Console to check for crawling issues.
Need Help? Our Team at Shelley's Social Media, LLC does this every day and are very pleased to help you with your Sitemap!