Editorial Staff
Googlebot follow link in order to discover one page to another pages. Sometimes, they got lost if the website’s internal linking isn’t good.
XML sitemaps act as the roadmap to tell the search engine bot what are all the contents available on a website and how to reach it.
Same like when you go to the new theme park that you never been before. When there is no map presence, you just explore the park based on the route you choose.
And sometimes, you didn’t get to explore all the rides since you thought that you have explored all and decided to leave the park.
This is why XML sitemap is important for SEO as they can help the search engine find your pages quickly.
What is XML Sitemap?
XML sitemap is a file that list all your website’s URL.
The term comes from “website map” which basically act as the roadmap to tell the search engine what are the URL that your site have and how to reach it.
Let’s take a look on below:
When you see the poor internal link structure on the right picture, the search engine bot need to go through 4 internal links to get into page 5.
And sometimes, the search engine bot get stuck in the dead end (for example page 2) with no internal links on it.
Meanwhile, XML sitemap solve this issue by showing all the 5 pages in a sitemap with one visit to the file.
What are The Benefits of Using XML Sitemap in SEO?
The ability of XML sitemap to list down everything in one page does assist in crawling and indexation by the spider bot.
It helps improve websites that:
- Large site that have thousand of pages.
- Weak internal linking.
- Tons of orphan pages.
- Lack of backlink profile.
- Frequent change or add new content.
Generally, everything that you put in the sitemap will be picked up faster by the search engine bot.
With that to say, it can get your pages get crawled and indexed faster by the search engine.
Note: submitting a sitemap with non-index URL also can speed up deindexation process.
How to Submit XML Sitemap?
1. Create the XML Sitemap
There are two ways to create a XML sitemap, a manual way and automatic way.
To save your time, we’ll just go through with the automatic way. But in case you still want to build it from scratch, you can refer here.
The easier way, you can do it automatically by using Yoast plugin.
Once you activated the XML sitemap from here, a new sitemap will automatically generated and you can see it by adding /sitemap_index.xml after your domain name.
2. Upload to Google Search Console
To make Google find your XML sitemap faster, you’ll need to add it to Google Search Console.
You can do it in the very easy steps:
First, sign in to your Google Search Console that already linked and verified with your website.
Then, click the sitemaps in the left side bar.
Add the XML sitemap URL and submit.
Afterwards, Google will crawl your new XMP sitemap file.
