Importance of Sitemap in SEO for Beginners | Lafandar.org

We need to submit URL of the new article to Search Engine so that a new page has been created and they can crawl the page. The search engine crawls the page even if you don't submit to them but according to their crawling schedule.

 Do you still manually submit URL to Search Engines whenever you publish the new article.This can be done by submitting sitemap of your website to  Search engines.

So What is sitemap, a sitemap is basically a file ( can be  XML, HTML or Text)that contains the list of web pages on your website web-crawler reads this file so that they can more intelligently crawl a website.A sitemap also contains the meta information of a page like last update, update time, how often the page changes, this meta information enables the crawlers to predict when to crawl the site next time.You can also provide the meta information of video and image contents on your site for better results like running time of the video, quality of the video, category, age appropriateness and for an image the dimension of the image , license etc.

Why does anyone need a sitemap?

If from the beginning your are linking your pages properly then most of the web crawlers will discovers most of the content on your website but due to following reasons you may need to create a sitemap :-

1. Your Website is too large :-

If your website is too big sitemap tells search bots about updated and newly published content.

2.Your site is just Launched :- 

Web Crawlers Crawls the web from one page to another following the links on the pages. If you have not linked the all pages Bots may not discover all the content of site.

So How to Build a Sitemap :-

You can build sitemap of your website by manually or you can use third party tools to create a site map :-

Manually 

1. 1. Make a list of pages that you want to be crawled by Search Bots.
2. 2.Decide which site format you want to use there are various sitemap format as I already told sch as XML, HTML, RSS, mRSS and ATOM 1.0 .If your are pretty good a coding you can create a site manually.

Third Party Tools ;- 

There are various online tools that you can use to do the work for you. You can use this link to create sitemap for you.

After you have created the sitemap from third party tool you need to submit it to search engines like Google . It can be done in two ways by navigating to Google search Console and submitting the sitemap or by adding a bit of lines in the Robots.Txt file as :-

Sitemap : http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml 

Final Words :- Submitting sitemap to Search Engine doesn't mean that all of your content will be indexed as they have very complex algorithms about crawling schedule. however you will get the benefits in the search presence, and this is your site no body is going to penalized you for having a sitemap of your website.