Adding an XML Sitemap to your website

What is an XML Sitemap?

XML Sitemaps are one of the easiest ways for website designers to inform search engines about those pages on the websites which are available for crawling.

Sitemaps are an XML file that list the URLs of a website in addition to metadata about each URL, last updates, recent changes, and relevance to other URLs in the site, so that search engines can more effectively crawl the site.

Web crawlers usually discover pages from links within the site and from other sites. Sitemaps supplement this data to allow crawlers that support Sitemaps to pick up all of URLs within the Sitemap and learn about those URLs using the associated metadata.

Using Sitemap protocol (*) 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.

Top Pick -  Plugin for Creating XML Sitemaps!

WordPress SEO by Yoast

(with XML Sitemap creation)

WordPress SEO has the most advanced XML Sitemaps functionality in any WordPress plugin. Once you check the box, it automatically creates XML sitemaps and notifies Google & Bing of the sitemaps existence. These XML sitemaps include the images in your posts & pages too, so that your images may be found better in the search engines too.

These XML Sitemaps will even work on large sites, because of how they’re created, using one index sitemap that links to sub-sitemaps for each 1,000 posts. They will also work with custom post types and custom taxonomies automatically, while giving you the option to remove those from the XML sitemap should you wish to.

Because of using XSL stylesheets for these XML Sitemaps, the XML sitemaps are easily readable for the human eye too, so you can spot things that shouldn’t be in there.

Author: Joost De Valk

WordPress SEO by Yoast – The Definitive Guide

* Explanation of the XML Sitemap Protocol:

www.Sitemap.org

For more info on Sitemaps:

Click here!