How to Create Sitemaps for WordPress to Help Search Engines Rank You

Sitemaps are one of the keys to gaining recognition from search engines and getting a better ranking for your WordPress site.

Have you ever wondered how popular search engines pick up on brand new websites and include them in their search? (Hint: You don’t have to bribe them!) Sitemaps help search engines crawl your website efficiently and effectively; discovering posts and pages that might otherwise have lain in hiding.

In this article, we’ll cover everything you need to know about sitemaps for WordPress. We’ll look at why they’re so important, take in popular methods for creating these essential files, and finish up with a tutorial on how to submit sitemaps to Google and Bing.

What Sitemaps Are and Why You Need Them

Sitemaps enable webmasters to inform search engines about the pages on their site that are (and aren’t) available for crawling. They are like maps that tell a web crawler where your site’s pages are and how to reach them.

Back in the day, sitemaps were hand-coded in HTML format, and their central purpose was to assist users and make site navigation simpler. Sitemaps have evolved a lot since then. Today they are published in XML, and their goal is to improve search engine optimization by enabling search engines to crawl the site intelligently.

XML sitemaps are basically documents that contain information about the pages and posts on your site, when a particular page was last modified, the priority of pages and how frequently a page is expected to undergo change.

Aside from improving your site’s user experience, adding a sitemap to your site will also:

• Require less reliance on external links to bring search engines to your site.
• Give new sites a solid start in terms of their content being crawled and indexed.
• Aid in classifying your site’s content.

The importance of sitemaps should not be overlooked – now is as good a time as any to create your own.

Best Practices for Implementing XML Sitemaps

At a bare minimum, XML sitemaps are lists of URLs with some metadata attached to them. Search engines look for two pieces of information in your sitemap:

1. The URL: In XML sitemaps, every URL should be able to be fetched by Googlebot & Co. Don’t include URLs that are disallowed by the robots.txt file. All of your URLs should be canonical. You should avoid including URLs of duplicate pages in your XML sitemap.
2. The last modification time: Specifying a last modification time against each URL is important. It should be updated every time a meaningful change is made to the page or post the URL relates to.

Generating XML sitemaps is a great way to optimize crawling of a site for search engines. The key information in these XML files is the canonical URL and the time of the last modification of pages within the website. Setting these correctly and informing Google and other search engines through sitemap pings will enable your website to be crawled optimally and be represented better in search results.

But fear not! As you’re probably aware, none of this is work you need to do yourself. Let’s move on to our list of the best automated sitemap solutions for WordPress.

Best Sitemap Plugins for WordPress