The Sitemap: What It Is and Why It Is Essential for Your Website
Let’s start with a simple, clear definition: as the word itself suggests, the sitemap is the map of the site. But what does that mean? In what sense is it possible to map a website, and what is it for?
The concept is very simple and can be explained with an easy comparison. The site map can be compared to the index of a book, which contains all the book’s contents in an orderly, clear way. In the same way, the sitemap is a document that lists all the URLs on the site, their links, and the hierarchy between them. In other words, the sitemap summarizes the structure of the site itself.
This is important both for users and, above all, for search engines. Having a well-structured site map allows search engine crawlers to index the site correctly, scanning its content and assessing its functionality.
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Sitemap and Indexing
This takes us in detail into how websites work and how they appear in search results. When we talk about indexing, we mean the way the site is read by the search engine so that it can be served to users based on their queries. The sitemap serves precisely to facilitate this scanning process, allowing crawlers to catalog content more quickly.
This does not mean that the sitemap directly determines the position at which the site will appear in the SERP: ranking and indexing are different concepts.
Indexing and ranking are related and complementary.
What Is the Sitemap For?
The sitemap allows the search engine to scan the site more quickly. It is worth knowing that Google does not guarantee that all the pages in the sitemap file will actually be indexed.
Googlebot operates according to complex algorithms that are continuously updated, and the ranking factors that can affect positioning are many and varied.
This is to clarify that, even by creating a correct sitemap, there is no guarantee that the site will be fully indexed and, above all, it does not rank automatically through this operation. To achieve this goal, a complete SEO strategy is needed, of which the sitemap is only part of the first step.
Creating the Sitemap: Basic Features
Creating a site’s sitemap, as we have seen, is a basic activity. However, there are some mandatory settings and useful pieces of information to keep in mind before venturing into a territory that can become thorny if you don’t know it thoroughly!
For example, it is important to know that, to be valid, the Sitemap must have very specific characteristics suggested by Google itself: it cannot be larger than 50 MB and cannot contain more than 50,000 URLs. It follows that, if the site is very large, several smaller sitemaps must be created and grouped into an index file.
From HTML to XML
When it comes to creating the sitemap, there are two formats. The HTML one was the first to be created and was designed mainly for users. It is an actual page within the site that contains the full list of the other pages, complete with hyperlinks to each of them. This way, the visitor had a kind of index in front of them to find their way around the portal. The HTML sitemap improves the user experience, an essential element for a website that is easy to access and use.
In 2005 the XML sitemap was launched, designed specifically for search engines. It is a document that is not visible to users and serves solely to show the site’s structure to crawlers such as Googlebot. This file contains the URLs, their hierarchy, and the update frequency. This is one of the most important and most interesting pieces of data for the search engine, which performs a new full scan with every update.
The Sitemap Within Your SEO Strategy
Since it is an element that serves the correct indexing of the site, the sitemap is a fundamental factor for a complete SEO strategy. When we talk about SEO we mean search engine optimization, and the goal of the site map is precisely to make the site optimal in the eyes of the system.
Once created, it must be submitted to the tool Google provides for reading the website, Google Search Console. This tool serves precisely to monitor the site’s presence in search engines, checking its structure and highlighting any limitations and errors. The sitemap is submitted only once; its updating depends on how it was generated and can be manual or automatic.
Creating a sitemap is the job of webmasters, developers, and SEO specialists. Over the years, the technical creation process has become much simpler. For example, for a WordPress site, the sitemap will be created by installing one of the plugins that provides this functionality. But advice on the best menu and navigability settings still remains the domain of expert consulting.
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