What is a sitemap for WordPress?
Well sitemaps are not just for WordPress websites, they are common among all website across the web.
It is an important tool for search engine optimization and helps your website be easy read by search engine algorithms.
Basically a sitemap is like a striped down (of fancy visual elements) version of a web page that indexes all your website links.
There are a lot of different types of sitemaps, each one has its own propose, but the most common used type of sitemap especially on WordPress website is the XML sitemap.
What are sitemaps used for?
Sitemaps are used to help search engines better index your web pages, also it can better detect potential errors (404 pages) and at the same time know where to look if you post something new on the site.
This is helpful in most cases but especially if you have or planning to build a large website with content that is updated regularly.
How can i create a sitemap for WordPress?
Basically all the wordpress SEO plugins offer an option to generate a XML sitemap for you.
- Generate a sitemap with Yoast
- Generate a sitemap with All in one SEO
- Generate a sitemap with Rank Math
If you are not using one of the plugins mentioned above there is another way to generate a sitemap quick and easy.
Install the Google XML Sitemaps plugin from the WordPress repository and the module will generate it automatically for you. Also it will auto-update once you’ve updated the content on your website.
How do you submit the sitemap to Google?
There are multiple search engines around. The most popular one is Google, so will asume that you want to make your site visible to this search engine.
To submit a sitemap to Google you can do it in different ways.
First method is to create a Google Search Console account. Ad your website in the service and then you will see a tab called „Sitemaps” in the left side menu.
Here you will enter the sitemap link generated.
The second method that i use sometimes is to insert the sitemap link in the robots.txt file that is located in the root of your page. It will look something like this and you have to create a new line anywhere on the robots.txt file.
Sitemap: http://example.com/sitemap_location.xml
Well thats about it. Now whats left is for you to do some awesome articles in your niche so that Google spots you.
In the near future will talk about how can you rank higher in Google with your content.
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