What is a website sitemap? The benefits and how to create a sitemap need to know

Sitemap website is an extremely important step when conducting SEO for the website. It helps guide the Google bot to quickly get to all the content on the website. And how to create a sitemap for a website so that users can easily find content, and Google also easily covers information throughout the site? Let's find out with SEMTEK right in the following article.

Learn about Sitemap website

1. What is a website sitemap?

A sitemap (also known as a sitemap) is a text file that contains all the URLs (paths) of a website. The sitemap may also contain metadata about each URL notification will be sent to you when it is newly updated.

In addition, what does the Sitemap mean and how does it relate to other URLs in the site? The entire job of a Sitemap is to guide search engines to efficiently crawl your site and to update any changes to your site, like adding a new page or changing an existing site. in.

According to the object of use, sitemap is usually divided into 2 types:

Sitemap for users: usually arranged as a normal html page.

Sitemap for search engines: usually made into a file named sitemap.xml to declare to search engines.

2. What is the role of sitemap website?

Sitemap plays an extremely important role in website design. This is the diagram to help google understand your website, what urls does the website have? So that google can index the data displayed to users when searching and visiting your website.

A website with a Sitemap will help that website get a high position in the rankings of today's search engines because most of the time it requires a good website evaluation, standard optimization, then that website must have an easy-to-navigate sitemap. access for users. This is a factor that helps optimize your SEO, optimize your onpage best.

3. Why is a website sitemap necessary?

Our website needs to have a sitemap. Because in the sitemap definition we have learned, it functions as a web map and is essential for your website to achieve a high position in the search system.

Because search systems appreciate websites that have a navigation map when accessing the website. Very useful for search engine bots scouring your site for indexing, benefiting SEO strategy.

There are many supporting software to make sitemaps like Gsitemap, but the following article will show you how to make sitemaps directly on the internet effectively that many SEOs have used.

Sitemap website benefits

1. Influencing the SEO process

Sitemap in your website has an impact on the SEO process of your website. It contributes to informing the Google search engine that your website has SEO standards.

For example: You have some articles on the website but they are not (or not) indexed. So in that case, Sitemap is the tool that tells Google about this article. From there, Google will index these articles more quickly.

2. Help Google index new website faster

Sitemap will be very useful for newly established websites.

These new websites always have many difficulties in indexing, because there are too few backlinks. So, Sitemap will be very useful for search engine bots scouring your Site to index, because it tells Google to index your website, beneficial for SEO strategy.

3. Support user experience when the website has a sitemap

In terms of users, the Sitemap in the website helps visitors to shape and understand the website's structure better, and can access and find the information they need in the most accurate way.

The more detailed the sitemap, the clearer the hierarchy, the higher the ability to increase the experience and attract users.

Types of website sitemaps

1. Create sitemap for users to see

In it, displays the website structure, links to subpages, and can briefly describe the content of each page. The purpose is for readers to easily look up, learn, and quickly access the necessary subpages.

Depending on the size of the website, how detailed this sitemap is. Small sites can create links to each subpage. As for the large site, it is possible to create a diagram only to page level 2, 3, but not detailed to level 4 (because there are too many, users can't see it all).

Because it is intended for human viewing, the information is often general in nature and cannot be detailed with a website with too many subpages. Then usually only give links to the main categories only.

The way to create this file is actually the same as a regular webpage. Use your webmaster tools to create a new page. Information in the body will be entered manually, or based on the information generated in the xml file (below), to choose which pages to include in this diagram.

You should also include an explanatory summary corresponding to each link, helping users understand the content of each page. Thanks to that, it is easy to find information, and encourage users to continue reading.

2. Create SEO standard and free sitemap.xml

This file is used to declare for Google to easily access and crawl (crawl) the entire website quickly. This is to create friendliness and ease with Google, which is also a step in SEO work.

For the purpose of Search Engines, and those who do SEO, this list should be as detailed as possible. Of course, it is necessary to exclude subpages that you intentionally do not want to declare to search engines. Google will follow this map to index your website.

The sitemap.xml file is in the form of programming code, so it is not very user-friendly. Programmers can read and understand, but if you're not in the industry, it's not a big deal.

How to create website sitemap

The way to create a sitemap.xml file is also quite simple, because there are now online tools to support it. For this to work, you need a website that is already up and running and a computer connected to the internet. If possible, downloading and running additional Notepad++ software should suffice.

Step 1: Visit xml-sitemaps.com

You do a few things:

Enter your website domain in the box: Your website URL

See also the “Why do you need a sitemap” explanation, if needed.

In the More Option section (more options): you can leave the default, or change it to suit your needs. Select parameters as daily, weekly... in the box "Change frequency"

Press the Enter key or the Start button to get started. You wait for this tool to create the necessary file. The time is fast or slow depending on the size of your website. Large web pages with many pages have to wait longer, and vice versa. As I noticed, for a website with less than 100 simple subpages, it will take about 5-10 minutes to finish (there will be a notification).

View the resulting message, can choose to view it in xml (for machines) or html (for humans, as I mentioned in the above section).

Step 2: Download the resulting file to your computer for editing

With html file: you create a new page in your Website admin, then copy the name and link, and add a short intro accordingly.

With xml file: after downloading to your computer, you can use Notepad software to edit more (if you want). If you don't know how, or don't want to tweak it further, you can skip to Step 3.

Note: the Priority parameter specifies the priority of the urls for your website, if any Url is important you should value more, the highest is 1.0 and the lowest is 0.1

Step 3: Upload the xml file to the website

Upload the sitemap.xml file after editing in the above step to the root directory, which means this file will be on the same level as index.php , index.asp, index.html… on your website.

After uploading, you need to register this sitemap with search engines. This is a work step that only needs to be declared for the first time, then Google or Bing will update itself. See also verify sitemap at Google Webmaster.

Creating and registering sitemaps with Search Engines plays a very important role in website optimization. And for SEOs, this is one of the important work steps, and it is imperative to check when implementing the work.