What is Sitemap and how to make Sitemap for Blog?

 

Are you wondering what is a sitemap and how to create a sitemap for your WordPress and Blogger blog, definitely read this post for complete information?

Usually, a sitemap is a list of all the URLs of your site.  Sitemap simply makes it easier for search engines to understand and index your content.  Before the steps to generate your sitemap, let us let you know some general information on the sitemap.

What is Sitemap? (what is sitemap in SEO) 

A sitemap is an XML file where you provide information about pages, videos, images, and other files on your site to the search engine, which the search engine bots can easily crawl your site.

A sitemap tells Google which pages and files in your site are important to you and also provides valuable information about these files.  Like when was the page last updated, how many times has the page been changed, and whether the page is in another language.

Google can detect different types of sitemaps.  List of Sitemap file types HTML, Video, Image, Mobile, News.

What is XML Sitemap?  

Generally speaking, the sitemap of a blog is considered as “XML Sitemap”.

A good XML sitemap works as a road map for your website, which takes Google to all your important pages.  This is good for SEO, as they allow Google to quickly find the site pages you need, even if your internal linking is not good.

XML Sitemap vs HTML Sitemap 

The main difference is that XML sitemap is created for search engines and HTML sitemap is created for its readers or users.

There are many pages inside a blog, an HTML sitemap is used for visitors to easily find those pages.  This can improve the user experience of your site.

An HTML sitemap should have an anchor link that points to every web page of your website.  This ensures that your entire site can be crawled by search engines.

Image Sitemap  

Image sitemap is used to improve the indexing of image content.

However, due to the embedding of the image with the page content, the page gets crawled with the URL.  Because of this, an image sitemap is unnecessary for most websites.  But if your stock photo website or e-commerce site then using a separate sitemap for the image can be helpful for image ranking.

Video Sitemap

Similar to images, if videos are important to your site, submit an XML video sitemap.  If not, a video sitemap is unnecessary.  This helps the video to rank better in Google search.

Google News sitemap

Only sites registered with Google News can use this sitemap.  Google News Sitemaps provide information along with metadata about specific news on a site.

This allows the site owner to control which content is submitted to Google News.  Using a news sitemap, Google news can quickly find the news on a site.

How to see the URL of your blog's sitemap?

You want to find the XML sitemap for your website so that you can check that it is valid and submit the URL to search engines.

In the left sidebar of your blog home page URL, enter /sitemap.xml.  Your sitemap URL will look something like this: http://example.com/sitemap.xml or

http://example.com/sitemap_index.xml

Whether your blog is on Blogger or WordPress, creating a sitemap is very easy.  Below you can see the complete process of how to create an XML sitemap and submit it to the search console.

There are many plugins inside WordPress to generate sitemaps, which can make your work easier.  Here I am using Yoast SEO to create a sitemap in WordPress. Yoast SEO is the most popular plugin to improve the SEO of your site.  It can also help you create XML sitemaps.