What Is The Best Tool To Create Sitemap?
There are several tools available that can help you generate an XML sitemap for your website. Some options include XML-sitemaps.com, Yoast SEO Plugin, phpSitemapNG, AuditMyPC Sitemap Generator, G-Mapper 2.2, TheSiteMapper, Drupal XML sitemap, Screaming Frog, Inspyder Sitemap Creator, Flowmapp, GitMind, Slickplan, GlooMaps, and Google XML Sitemaps. T
hese tools can be used to create sitemaps for a variety of CMS platforms and can also be used to submit sitemaps to search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Some of these tools are free, while others require a one-time payment or a subscription fee.
How Do I Create A Sitemap?
To create a sitemap, you need to identify which URLs you want to include in the sitemap and choose the preferred URL for any content that is accessible under multiple URLs. You can create a sitemap in one of several ways, depending on your site architecture and the number of URLs you need to include:
- Use your content management system (CMS) to generate a sitemap for you. Many CMS platforms, such as WordPress, Wix, and Blogger, have built-in sitemap generation capabilities.
- Manually create a sitemap using a text editor and following the syntax described in the Sitemap Formats section. This is only feasible for sitemaps with a small number of URLs.
- Use a tool to automatically generate a sitemap. There are various tools available that can generate a sitemap, but the best option is to have your website software generate it for you. You can extract your site’s URLs from the database and export them to a file on your web server.
Keep in mind that sitemaps have size limits, so you may need to manage large sitemaps if you have a large number of URLs to include.
To create a sitemap manually, follow these steps:
- Determine which pages on your website should be included in the sitemap and determine the canonical version of each page. Make sure to exclude any pages that are blocked by robots.txt, require a login to access, or are password-protected, as search bots will not be able to crawl them.
- Determine if you need more than one sitemap, as websites with more than 50,000 URLs may require multiple sitemaps.
- Code the URLs in XML tags to create the type of sitemap you want.
- If you have multiple sitemap files, create a sitemap index file and include links to the individual sitemaps.
How To Submit Your Sitemap To Google
To submit your sitemap to Google, you can use one of the following methods:
- Submit the sitemap through the Sitemaps report in Google Search Console. This will allow you to see when Googlebot accessed the sitemap and any potential processing errors.
- Use the Search Console API to programmatically submit the sitemap.
- Use the ping tool by sending a GET request in your browser or command line to the specified address, including the full URL of the sitemap. Make sure that the sitemap file is accessible.
- Include the following line in your robots.txt file, specifying the path to your sitemap.
- Use WebSub if you use Atom/RSS for your sitemap and want to notify other search engines in addition to Google about changes to your sitemap.
It’s important to note that submitting a sitemap is just a suggestion and does not guarantee that Google will download or use the sitemap for crawling URLs on your site.
Additionally, you should only submit or ping a sitemap when it is new or updated, and avoid submitting or pinging unchanged sitemaps multiple times. If you have updated pages in the sitemap, mark them with the <lastmod> field. Other XML files have a similar field, such as <updated> for Atom XML.
