How to Use the Sitemap Generator？
As we all know, creating a sitemap for the website and keeping it up-to-date are essential SEO practices. But what is a sitemap? What kind of sitemap do we need? How can we a sitemap? Below, I break down everything you need to know about a sitemap and how to create a sitemap with high efficiency when building, redesigning, and maintaining websites. This article aims to introduce the sitemap information and how to use a sitemap generator so you can welcome search engine spiders and help them find the route efficiently when they visit. This article focuses on the XML sitemap to help website managers improve your website ranking. Read on！
1. What is Sitemap?
A city map can help people understand where they are now and where they can go. The same thing goes for that the website map can help search engine spider knows what pages your website has, and the list of pages of your website is called "sitemap." It is a list of pages of a website accessible to crawlers or users to help them navigate the site. It displays the relationship between various pages and content of the website, demonstrating the way that the website organized, and how it can be navigated and labeled.
2. What are the types of sitemap?
There are mainly two different types of sitemaps, including XML sitemaps and HTML sitemaps.
The XML sitemap：It is a list of URLs so that the search engines can quickly know which pages you want them to crawl and index. It informs the search engines about pages are on the website, relates their importance to each other, as well as how often they are updated. It often mentions in the SEO field refers to XML sitemap as it is written for search engines that which pages are essential.
The HTML sitemap：It is a traditional sitemap, written for website users for giving them an understanding of the network structure of the entire website. It enables lost human users to find a page on your site what they are looking for. It is a bulleted outline text version of the site navigation. You provide a better user experience by providing an HTML sitemap.
3. Why create a sitemap?
Sitemap plays an essential role in SEO. Search engines can crawl and index your website more completely to read the content on your site according to the XML sitemap. Your sitemap tells search engines the location of a page on your website, the updated time, the updating frequency, and the importance of the page as it's related to other pages on your site. As a result, it increases your chances of boosting the SEO ranking of your website. Without a proper sitemap, Google bots might think that your site has duplicate content, which will hurt your SEO ranking.
Besides, the XML sitemap can improve the weight of the linked page as it is a connection of links to other pages. At this time, the sitemap will add an import link to the page and the increase of import link will affect the weight of the page, thereby improving the inclusion rate.
The existence of the HTML sitemap is not only to meet the needs of search engine crawlers but also to facilitate website visitors to browse the website, especially for the portal type website. Because there is too much information, many visitors find their information pages through the site map, which can also improve the user experience by using.
4. How to build and submit a sitemap?
There are two main ways to generate a sitemap on the Internet, including create your sitemap manually and use generator tools. If your website has fewer pages and updates, you can choose to make a sitemap manually. If your site has many pages, you need to update it frequently, or you think that manual updates are too time-consuming, you can choose the appropriate sitemap generators to do it. We recommend you build a sitemap by a generator with high efficiency.
There are many sitemap generator tools in the market, but the most common tool is the online generator, which is the function of this free online site.
It is one of your best choices to create a sitemap fast for your website — no registration required, no ads, and any third parties involved. You just need to input a valid website URL into the input box, click Start, waiting for processing to complete and choose the sitemap format you want. After downloading the sitemap file, you just need to upload it.
The most important thing to upload the sitemap to the root directory of the website is to add the link address of the sitemap to the robots file and make the spiders convenient to grab on the page. Don't forget to add the location of your sitemap file to the robots.txt
5. Where is the sitemap located?
The sitemap.xml file usually saves in the root folder of your domain. Some website manager saves their sitemap.xml to other locations to make it harder for competitors to find. However, you should send the sitemap to a search engine to ensure that its crawler bot can find your sitemap if you want to do so. The best way to do this is to add your sitemap.xml to your robots.txt.
The sitemap can be published anywhere on the site, but the sitemap only affects the descendants of the parent directory. When the engine crawler comes in to grab the web page, it will first check robots.txt. If a sitemap is written first into robots.txt, the efficiency will be significantly improved by giving a good feeling to the search engine.
6. Construction skills of sitemap
First, please split the more extensive sitemap into smaller sitemaps If your site is large because the maximum sitemap size is 50000 URLs / 50 MB uncompressed.
Secondly, please use fully-qualified and consistent URLs. The search engine will crawl your URLs exactly as listed. Don't forget missing www.
Last, we suggest you add the site map to the link below our homepage, which is more conducive to the craw lability of our sitemap. If the site map placed on our homepage, it can fully ensure that the Google search engine crawls the site map.
Conclusion
In short, You can use this sitemap generator to create a sitemap by for your website if you're ready to take your SEO strategy to the next level. Overall, it is a genuinely excellent free online sitemap tool — and arguably one of the very best sitemap generators.