“Links, videos, images, and content generally there’s no website that doesn't use them, But do search engines know what your website uses? ”
What are Sitemaps?
A sitemap is a file that lists URLs for a site with metadata about each URL, so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.
We use sitemaps to provide information about the types of content on your pages:
- An image entry can include the location of the images included in a page.
- A news entry can include the article title and publication date.
- A video entry can specify the video running time, rating, and age-appropriateness rating.
Also provides valuable information about these files. Sitemaps supplement this data to allow crawlers that support Sitemaps to pick up all URLs in the Sitemap and learn about those URLs using the associated metadata. Using the Sitemap does not guarantee that web pages are included in search engines, but provides hints for web crawlers to do a better job of crawling your site.
Do you need a sitemap?
- If your site's pages are properly linked: NO
- If your website is small: No
- If Your website doesn’t have many media files (video, image) or news pages: NO
- If you're using a CMS such as WordPress, Wix, or Blogger: NO
You might need a it if:
- Your site is really large
- Your site is new and has few external links to it
- Your site has a lot of rich media content (video, images) or is shown in Google News
- Your site has a large archive of content pages that are isolated or not well linked to each other
Well, It depends on how big your website is, that's why it can get more complex if your website is too big:
and here is Google's sitemap:
How to create a sitemap?
When creating a sitemap, you're telling search engines about which URLs you prefer to show in search results.
Well already there’s a sitemap generators out there:
- Google sitemap generator
- Yoast SEO Sitemap Plugin - (Specially for wordpress)
- xml-sitemaps.com
Tools to create Visual/Graphical sitemaps::
Resources:
Top comments (1)
The Google sitemap generator that you linked to doesn't appear to have ever gone beyond beta. The version at that link is a beta from 2009, on Google Code which was shut down in 2016. That one appears to have been abandoned long ago.