What are Sitemaps ? How to Create sitemaps?
Many times you must have seen an option at the bottom of many websites in which it is written Sitemap, the question will also arise in your mind that what is this Sitemap. In today's article, we are going to tell you about what Sitemap is and how to make it.
Till some time ago, there used to be an option of Sitemap on the home page of many government websites, HTML was used for Sitemap till some time back, but as time and technology are changing, in the same way now many Sitemaps are displayed in XML on the website.
What is Sitemap?
In fact, Sitemap is a list of all the pages present on any website, if we have not included the page of our website or blog in Sitemap, then no one can see those pages by going to Google's search engine. Sitemaps are very important for every website or blog because through this any search engine gets information about the pages available on your website or blog.
Apart from all this, information is also received through Sitemap that the content of the blog or website created by you is on what topic, how often do you update the blog or website, keeping all these things in mind, your blog can be searched in any search. appear in the result.
Types of Sitemaps
So far we have come to know what a Sitemap is, now we will know what the types of Sitemaps are. By the way, there are mainly two types of Sitemaps.
XML Sitemap
HTML Sitemap
Now it becomes very important to know here that XML Sitemap also has two parts.
1.URL Sitemap
2.Index Sitemap
After this, now we have to understand that URL Sitemap also has three parts.
a) Video Sitemap
b) Sitemap For Web Pages
c) Image Sitemap
What is XML Sitemap?
Generally, XML is a language, in which all the information related to that website is stored in a well-organized format. It is very difficult for us to understand XML, but this is not the case with search engines, but all search engines understand XML very easily. In simple language, we can also say that XML Sitemap has been made for the search engine only, through this the search engine gets information about all the internal and external resources of the website.
What is HTML Sitemap?
As the name suggests, Sitemap is like a map of any website, HTML Sitemap stores the information of the website as well as its location. With the help of HTML Sitemap, one can get the information related to the website very easily. Just imagine that there are many web pages on any one website and it is not at all easy for anyone to find accurate information from it but with the help of Sitemap it becomes absolutely easy.
Why are XML Sitemaps Important?
If you look from the point of view of SEO, then Sitemap is very important for every type of website or blog, although due to Sitemap, no ranking increases in the search engine of any website or blog, but if your web page is not indexed yet. If so, they definitely get indexed through Sitemap.
Whenever you upload a new blog or article, there are not many backlinks available in that blog, due to which those blogs are not visible in the search engine, but due to XML Sitemap, your blog or website has been indexed. After which any search engine crawls on those websites very easily.
How do search engines find any sitemap?
So far we have come to know that Sitemaps are the life of any website and for this reason search engines show your website, but now we will try to know how a search engine finds a sitemap.
Search engines are technically very advanced, whenever we post any new blog or article, then through Ping, the search engine gets information that there has been some kind of change in the sitemap of the website.
How to make a Sitemap?
XML Sitemaps also contain metadata and this is the biggest advantage of XML Sitemaps, due to this we can also give additional information in the content of any web page. So let us now know how to create XML Sitemap
First of all you have to create a text file which needs to be renamed as Sitemap and save it in .Xml format.
After this we have to use the script given below so that the search engine will know how the sitemap is encoded.
<?Xml Version="1.0″ Encoding="UTF-8″?>
<Urlset Xmlns="http://Sitemaps.Org/Schemas/Sitemap/0.9″>
</urlset>
Now we have to add all the URLs present on the website.
<url>
<Loc>http://Www.Website.Com/</Loc>
<Lastmod>2021-01-01</Lastmod>
<Changefreq>Daily</Changefreq>
<Priority>1</Priority>
</url>
Add your URLs to the tags mentioned above. The Lastmod written after that means that you last modified your page. After that there is Changefreq which means in which interval you change your page such as Hourly, Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Yearly etc.
If your URLs are archived, use Never in frequency. After that the next step is that of Priority, it depends on you what kind of category you want to keep your page. Here 1 means very important. Its range is from 0.0 to 1.0 while By Default is 0.5.
After creating a sitemap, you have to upload it to your website and add it only by going to the Root Directory.
What to keep in mind while creating a sitemap?
When you are making a Sitemap, then you must keep some things in mind, let's know what those things are.
The maximum length of any URL you create should be up to 2048 characters.
You can only have up to 50,000 URLs in a Sitemap.
You also have to keep in mind that all URLs should be from the same host as a sitemap.
You can keep the maximum file size of any Sitemap up to 50 MB only.