Whenever you’re in an unfamiliar town, having a GPS makes navigating SO much quicker and easier. 

Well, XML sitemaps are the digital equivalent of GPS systems for search engine crawler bots. 

They provide search engines with a bird’s-eye view of your website’s structure and every URL that you want them to crawl. This greatly improves the crawling and indexing process, which is essential for getting your content to appear in Google’s search results. 

An SEO best practice is to build an XML sitemap for your website and then upload it directly to Google via your Google Search Console (GSC) account. 

This ensures that Google has visibility of all the URLs that you want to crawl, and those that you want bots to ignore (i.e., pages that don’t need to appear in the search results). 

Without a sitemap, crawling your website can become difficult for search engines, especially if you have zillions of URLs. 

As a rule of thumb, you should create a new sitemap for every 50,000 URLs that you have. 

However, most websites are small enough that they can get away with just having one sitemap. 

In this article, we’ll teach you:

  1. The different types of sitemaps 
  2. How to create a sitemap 
  3. How to submit your sitemap to Google Search Console 

These are essential tasks for SEOs of all skill levels, so stay tuned to learn more! 

What Exactly is a Sitemap?

To give a simple definition, a sitemap is a protocol that tells search engines (and sometimes users) which URLs on your website are available to crawl. 

A sitemap shares specific information about every URL on your website, including:

  • Its importance in relation to the rest of your URL structure 
  • How often it’s updated 
  • The date of its last update 

Also, the use of canonical and noindex tags lets Google know which web pages you DON’T want to be included in its index, meaning it will skip those pages. 

Why wouldn’t you want to include every URL on your website in Google’s search results?

There are two primary reasons why you don’t want search bots crawling every URL:

  1. Not every page plays a part in your sales funnel, so they don’t need to be ranked (such as login pages, admin pages, and thank you pages). 
  2. Google allocates a crawl budget for every website, and you don’t want to waste your precious budget on worthless pages. 

Speaking of crawl budgets, it’s crucial to know what they are and how they work. 

Essentially, crawling the internet takes a lot of resources (computing energy and money). To save money and limit its impact on the environment, Google uses crawl budgets. 

Frequently updated websites will have larger crawl budgets, as will well-known websites (like Amazon and Wikipedia). 

To get the most out of your crawl budget, you should:

  • Only mark your most important pages as crawlable (everything else should get a noindex tag) 
  • Update your content as often as you can to ensure frequent crawling 

Lastly, there are three distinct types of sitemaps. 

They are XML sitemaps, HTML sitemaps, and visual sitemaps, and they each serve different purposes. Let’s learn more about each type.

XML sitemaps 

First, an XML sitemap is strictly for search engines, as your website’s users won’t be able to see it. 

It’s an XML formatted protocol that provides crucial metadata about every URL on your website. This data includes the three factors mentioned previously (relation to your site’s structure, the last update, and how often a page gets updated). 

XML sitemaps greatly aid in the crawling and indexing process on search engines. This is extremely important because if search engine bots can’t crawl and index your content, it won’t appear in the search results. 

The SEO benefits of XML sitemaps include the following:

  • Better online visibility. Assuming the rest of your SEO is in line, uploading an XML sitemap to GSC can improve your content’s visibility. This is because A) crawler bots may find important web pages they may not have without a sitemap and B) bots will know how frequently to recrawl your content to catch crucial updates, which may help you rank higher! 
  • Crystal clear site structure. Creating an XML sitemap is a great way to improve your site architecture. While compiling the map, you may notice different ways to consolidate your website’s design, such as ‘flattening’ things out (making it so each page is only a click or two away from the homepage). 
  • Faster indexing for updates. Sitemaps specifically communicate to search engines how often you update each URL, meaning crawler bots will know precisely when to revisit your pages to refresh aging content. This can translate to better rankings if your updates include new keywords to target and provide fresh insights. 

As you can see, there are plenty of reasons why it’s worth developing an XML sitemap for your website. 

HTML sitemaps 

Also called a website archive, an HTML sitemap is an HTML file that lists every page on your website. 

Where XML sitemaps are for search engines, HTML sitemaps are for your users. 

Why would you need a sitemap for your users?

For the same reason they have brightly-lit map kiosks in the mall: they help your customers find their way around easier. 

An HTML sitemap contains hyperlinks to all your web pages in one location, which is very convenient for users trying to find their way around. It’s also a great way to reduce bounce rates and improve your user experience. 

What are bounce rates? Your bounce rate refers to the percentage of website visitors who click away from your site after viewing only one page. In other words, they didn’t continue to engage with your website by navigating to other pages (like a landing page). By including an HTML sitemap, users can quickly navigate to any page on your website, which will encourage them not to bounce. It’s crucial not to confuse bounce rates with dwell time, which refers to how long someone stays on your website (even if they only visit one page). 

While some SEOs claim that HTML sitemaps are outdated, they’re viewing it from a purely technical standpoint. 

Reducing bounce rates and improving your user experience are two benefits that we feel make including HTML sitemaps worth it. 

That’s why we include an HTML sitemap on our website! 

Visual sitemaps 

The last type of sitemap doesn’t have any direct impact on your SEO per se, so we won’t spend much time explaining it. 

Basically, a visual sitemap is just a visualization tool to make sense of your site’s architecture and internal structure while designing (or redesigning) it. 

In fact, it doesn’t even have to be a digital file. You could create a visual sitemap by sticking index cards to a dry-erase board. 

Here’s an example of what one looks like:

Visual sitemaps can be powerful tools for designing easy-to-navigate websites, so they can definitely come in handy (and improve your user experience). 

For the rest of this article, we’re going to focus exclusively on XML sitemaps. 

The Different Subsections of XML Sitemaps 

Within XML sitemaps, there are various subsets that deal with various aspects of your website. 

Here’s a quick look at them all:

  • Page sitemap. A page sitemap also goes by the name regular sitemap because it’s the most common. It mainly contains text and hyperlinks, but you can also include a few images and videos. Page sitemaps improve the indexation of web pages and blog posts, so they’re good to use. 
  • Video sitemap. As the name suggests, this type of sitemap focuses primarily on video. If videos are crucial to your business (and you have a lot of them), then it’s a good idea to use a video sitemap. If you only have a few videos, you’re better off using a page sitemap and adding the video files to it (to save on your crawl budget). 
  • News sitemap. If you’re trying to get featured on Google News, then you’ll need to create a news sitemap. However, you should ONLY use it for news posts, as news sitemaps aren’t favored in regular rankings (organic search) and they don’t support images. 
  • Image sitemap. Does your website contain dozens of photos? Then, an image sitemap is the way to go. Like a video sitemap, it’s specifically designed to support images. 
  • Sitemap index. Lastly, a sitemap index is a file listing all your sitemaps. It’s normal for larger websites to have more than one sitemap (like having a news sitemap, a video sitemap, AND an image sitemap), and it’s easy to lose track of them all without an index. Yes, it’s essentially a sitemap for your sitemaps. 

Okay, now that you’re familiar with everything sitemap related, it’s time to learn how to actually create one! 

How to Build an XML Sitemap 

The good news?

Building an XML sitemap from scratch isn’t a complicated process, as it only contains two steps. 

The bad news?

Despite only having two steps, one of those steps involves manually coding every one of your URLs, which can quickly become a daunting and extremely tedious task depending on the size of your website. 

If you run a relatively small website that only contains a handful of URLs, this won’t be so bad. 

However, if your site has thousands upon thousands of URLs, you should consider automating the process, which we’ll discuss in a bit. 

For now, here’s how to create a brand-new XML sitemap. 

Step #1: Gather a list of all your URLs 

First, you need to compile a list of every URL on your website. 

Sure, you could manually visit each page on your website, but that may take forever if you have thousands of web pages. 

Our recommendation?

Use a web crawler like Screaming Frog to quickly put together a file containing all your URLs. While it is a paid tool, you are able to crawl up to 500 URLs for free, which can suffice for smaller websites. 

There are plenty of SEO spiders available online, and they all provide a speedy solution to listing all your URLs. 

Yet, just because you compile a list of every URL on your site doesn’t mean that you should get Google to index them all. 

Instead, take a close look at each URL and mark each one that you want to appear in the search results. You should mark every other URL as noindex so that you won’t forget later. 

Step #2: Code the URLs properly 

The next step is to code each URL in XML format. 

Using a text editor comes in handy here, such as Brackets (free) or Sublime Text (paid). 

Here’s how to code all the necessary information into each URL:

  • First, start by opening this tag:

<urlset xmlns=”https://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″> 

  • Next, add a URL by using <url> and <loc> tags, like this:

xmlns=”https://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″>

<url>

<loc>https://www.thehoth.com</loc>

This is actually all that’s required to format the URL, but you can (and should) add further details to improve your SEO. 

In particular, we need to add the following tags:

  • <changefreq>: This refers to how frequently you update the post. 
  • <lastmod>: The post’s last update.
  • <priority>: How important the page is to the rest of your website. Priority scores range from 0.0 to 1.0, with 1.0 being the highest level of priority. 

Here’s an example of these tags in action:

xmlns=”https://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″>

<url>

<loc>https://www.thehoth.com</loc>

<lastmod>2024-10-25</lastmod>

<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>

<priority>0.5</priority>

</url>

</urlset>

As you can see, you have to close each URL with </url> and </urlset> tags. Here’s some more information on the XML schema for the Sitemap protocol. 

Automating XML sitemap creation 

If you read the previous section and don’t feel like messing with any of that, there are tools out there that will automate the process for you. 

An example is the Yoast SEO plugin, which will automatically update your sitemaps and sitemap index every time you add or remove content. 

Here’s a guide on how to make it happen. 

Other options for automating XML sitemaps include:

Whether you automate sitemap creation or not, you’ll still need to upload it to Google Search Console, so let’s learn how to do that next. 

How to Upload Your XML Sitemap to Google Search Console 

By now, you should have an XML sitemap at the ready, but you’re not done yet. 

The final step is to upload it to GSC so that Google has direct visibility of your website’s structure and the URLs that you want included in its index. 

Luckily, this is by far the easiest process so far. 

First, log in to your GSC account and click on the Sitemaps link found on the left-hand sidebar. 

At the top of the page, there will be a bar where you can enter your XML sitemap. 

Enter the URL for your sitemap, and hit Submit. Voila, Google will now crawl your sitemap, so your work is now complete! 

While XML sitemaps are by far the most commonly used, they aren’t the only types of sitemaps that Google accepts. 

Other accepted sitemap formats include the following:

  1. Text sitemaps 
  2. RSS 
  3. mRSS
  4. Atom 1.0 sitemaps 

These aren’t very widely used at all, but just know that they are options if you need (or want) to use them. 

Using Your XML Sitemap for Enhanced Crawlability and Better SEO 

That wraps up how to create and upload an XML sitemap. We’ve gone over a ton of stuff so far, so here’s a quick refresher:

  1. There are both XML and HTML sitemaps, but XML sitemaps are exclusively for search engine crawlers. 
  2. Building an XML sitemap consists of A) gathering all your URLs and B) coding them in XML. 
  3. There are tools online that will automate XML sitemap creation and maintenance. 
  4. Uploading your sitemap to GSC improves the crawling and indexing process, which leads to better online visibility. 

Do you need help forming a winning SEO strategy (that includes uploading a sitemap to GSC)?

HOTH X is your all-in-one solution. It’s our fully managed service where we devise a comprehensive SEO strategy to meet (and exceed) all your goals. 

We’ll take your SEO off your hands so that you can focus on more important things, so don’t wait to sign up now!