So, what is a sitemap? Basically, it’s a document used to describe the navigational structure of your website. It’s a hierarchical map of your website which shows the connections between web pages, web page trees and website content.

They have a double purpose: to help your visitors to easily find their way through your site and to help the search engines to do the best job possible when reading and indexing the content of your website. Obviously, the structure and the format of a sitemap file will vary depending on its intended use.

Those dedicated to humans – the HTML sitemaps – are regular web pages used as additional navigation aids. Any self-respecting website will place a “Sitemap” link somewhere on the main page – usually in the footer section – in order to enhance the user experience. Evidently, the actual styling or formatting will vary depending on the designer’s tastes, but the goal is always the same: to provide a clear understanding of page content locations within the website. Let’s see a nice example from AWeber. Here's the text link:

And this is the actual HTML sitemap:

Simple and efficient as any sitemap should be.

Those dedicated to search engines and optimized for computer reading will typically take the form of an XML document, which basically, it’s a structured list of information enclosed in standardized tags forming an outline of key and value pairs. These can be search engine sitemaps, news sitemaps, RSS feeds, XML media sitemaps, etc. Needless to say, your XML sitemap must contain only pages that are actually there on your website and all the pages you want indexed must be included in the sitemap.

While you are trying to make a successful SEO for a WordPress website these sitemaps are especially important and useful if:

• your site has a large archive of content pages

• your site is relatively new and has few inbound links that can or could lead the crawlers to your website

• your website has any type of dynamically created content

• you have pages with images, frames, Flash elements, rich AJAX, etc or other content types that can’t be interpreted by spiders

• you want to inform search engines immediately about recently updated pages or any other changes made on your site

• you have a lot of – older – content with potential broken links or orphaned pages

• you are focusing on a very broad and segmented topic that must be efficiently classified

These XML sitemaps (often called “Google sitemaps”) will contain a lot more – optional, yet very useful – information for the search engines than the traditional HTML sitemaps, such as:

• priority; you can give a weight to your pages relative to each other; the idea is quite straightforward: to give a higher priority to your index page, your review pages, testimonial pages, etc that you really want to see in the search engine results; it won’t affect your overall rankings, but at least your TOS page won’t outperform your product pages in the search engine listings

• frequency; it’s always a good idea to tell search engines how frequently your site is likely to change; while your “Contact” page probably won’t change regularly, your blog content might change every day; these “suggestions” will help search engines to re-index your website more efficiently

• last modified; another useful option is to tell search engines when your site was last modified; it’s an important factor, because if your site hasn’t changed, the search engine may not bother to crawl it again; on the other hand, search engines have their own ways to determine whether a site has been modified, so if you are updating your sitemap using time-consuming manual methods probably it’s better to forget this option

OK. Now, that you know what a sitemap is and why is important, the next logical question which arises: how to create it?

Obviously, there are many solutions.

First of all, each reliable SEO plugin can generate (and submit) a sitemap.

Also, there are many extremely easy to use and free online solutions that will help you to create good sitemaps in a matter of seconds without any coding skills. For example:

CheckDomains

http://www.check-domains.com/sitemap/index.php

Or ...

Xml Sitemap Generator

https://xmlsitemapgenerator.org/sitemap-generator.aspx

OK. You have created a perfect sitemap. What’s next? Well, it’s pretty obvious, you might have a perfect XML sitemap, but if isn’t used by search engines, this makes it pointless.

You can do that in two ways: using your robots.txt file or informing the search engines manually. I recommend you to use both methods.

Leveraging the robots.txt file is extremely simple. As I already told you in the previous lesson, all you have to do is to provide the exact path to your sitemap: “Sitemap: http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml”. Make sure it’s the full URL, including the “http://” part too! And of course, you can add more than one sitemap if you need to (you may have different sitemaps for your main site, the blog, etc).

In order to notify Google manually, you’ll have to access your Google Webmaster Tools account. It means that you’ll need to sign up with a Google account if you don’t have one already. When you get into the Search Console you’ll have to prove that you are the legitimate owner of the given site. There are many different ways to do it, but the most common one is by uploading into your root folder a simple HTML file generated by Google. Here is how to authenticate your site:

• click the “ADD A PROPERTY” button and provide your URL
  

• on the next screen Google will give you clear instructions about the next steps; download the HTML file generated by Google, upload it into your root folder, click the confirmation link in the search console, and finally, click the red “VERIFY” button to complete the process:
  

Once your site appears in the Search Console as your approved property, you are ready to add your sitemap. Click the thumbnail of your site to access the dashboard, expand the “Crawl” drop-down menu and select “Sitemaps”:

On the upcoming screen click the red “ADD/TEST SITEMAP” button, type the exact name of your sitemap file and click the “Submit” button:

And that’s it! You have submitted your sitemap to Google! If you refresh the page you’ll see that Google has downloaded the sitemap and read it.

And here's a useful tip. Whenever you want to re-submit your sitemap, you don't need any plugins or tools. Simply enter this link into the address bar of your browser and hit enter. Don't forget to edit the URL!

https://www.google.com/ping?sitemap=https://yourdomain.com/s...

Notifying Bing manually it’s a very similar process. Create a Bing Webmaster account if you need to, log in, add your website and verify the ownership by uploading the generated XML file into your root folder. Then go to dashboard, click the “SUBMIT A SITEMAP” button, type the name of your sitemap file and click “SUBMIT”:

Simple as that!

Yahoo takes all the data from Bing so, you don’t have to submit your sitemap separately.

Ask.com no longer allows you to submit sitemaps, so the only way you can submit your sitemap to them, is via your robots.txt file.

The bottom line

Sitemaps will not make the standard crawling and indexing procedure obsolete, but the importance of sitemaps is increasing day by day. I know, among all those endless SEO-tips it’s very easy to underestimate the actual importance of the sitemaps and going without a sitemap it may seem acceptable or even natural for many website owners.

Believe me, not using sitemaps or using incorrect sitemaps it’s a big mistake! They are useful and important both for your users and search engines.

Search engines will follow closely your sitemap(s) when they are crawling your site, so having a good sitemap will definitely help you to improve the number of the indexed pages and to make a successful SEO for a WordPress website!

GREAT! Now, that you know how to create and how to submit your sitemaps, we can move forward to another very important sub-topic that is literally vital if you want to make a successful SEO for a WordPress website. In the next lesson I’ll show you how to handle redirects and 404 errors.