Last Updated on September 5, 2020 by Santhosh Muralidhar

When you first write and publish a brand new blog post, Google won’t know it even exists. It takes a bit of time for Google to fetch and index the new URLs of a website. Luckily, we can create a sitemap to cut short and reduce this time taken by Google bot to find the URL and index or reindex it.

Sitemaps will help search engines to understand the structure of the website.

A sitemap is an XML document that contains all the URLs of a website. 

They are used by Search engine crawlers like Google Test Bot to find and understand URLs of a website. 

Also, you can submit sitemaps to reindex any updated web page on your website.

The biggest advantage of using sitemaps is that it helps Google to fastly test your URLs and index/reindex them quickly. 

Often it will take weeks or months for Google to crawl and indexed the URL on search results.

To put it in simple terms Sitemaps would just accelerate this process and make your URL get indexed within 2-3 days.

Also when you add new information to your content or modify the content you must submit the sitemaps so that Google bot could much fastly scan your updated content and reindex those URLs.

In this blog post, I would like to take you through all the steps and processes to create and submit sitemaps for improving your website SEO. 

How Does a Sitemap Document look?

You can access the sitemap file of a website by correctly entering the corresponding path URL.

For example, if you want to look at my website sitemap then just go to the sitemap page.

Some websites will also add a footer link pointing to the sitemap file. This would help Google to easily detect the location of the XML document.

The Sitemap XML document would usually consist of three major things.

URL Location: All URLs of the corresponding posts and pages of your website which are accessed by Google crawler will be listed and displayed inside the sitemap document tree. This will include category URL, post and page URL, etc.

Last Modification: This usually indicates the last time and date when your website URLs were actually newly added/modified in the sitemap document.

Priority value: This will tell Google which particular URL’s must be prioritized and indexed faster. A value of 1 means the URL has the highest priority and priority value 0 means that the URL has the lowest priority.

Keep in mind that the priority value is relative to your website.

Create Sitemaps

You can generate sitemaps by using a tool known as XML-sitemaps.

It is one of the most trusted and safest tools to create sitemap.

This tool will allow you to easily create sitemaps without needing any technical knowledge.

All you need to do is just enter the website URL and start creating the sitemap document.

I will now explain to you the steps to practically create a sitemap using the tool.

First, follow the tool’s website link.

Enter your website URL and click Start.

Now sitemap generator tool will begin to crawl all the pages on your website. This process will take a few seconds.

Wait for the crawling to complete.

Next click on View sitemap details.

This will redirect you to the sitemap details page.

There Select the “Download XML sitemap file” option button.

Save the sitemap file on your computer.

Alternatively, You can either get a preview/full view of your sitemap file by scrolling down the details page.

Click on view full sitemap to see the file without downloading it.

On the right side you will get all the details associated with your XML file like creation date, the number of pages crawled and indexed, the time duration for crawling, broken links in the sitemap, etc.

The tool will also provide you other download options.

For example, you can download your sitemap file as an HTML file or a zip file. But most commonly in SEO, we submit a sitemap as an XML file to google. So that will be the best practice in this case.

Note: Sitemap File can be created by using other tools as well. But I find the free XML sitemaps tool to be the most convenient and secure one to use. Hence I recommended you to use the same tool.

Upload the Sitemap File 

To upload the sitemap you need to use the CPanel.

First, log in to the CPanel account and go the Dashboard.

Inside your CPanel dashboard Go to the file manager or any similar option which would redirect you to the home directory.

In the home directory, select the Public_html folder.

Upload the XML file inside the public_html folder.

Submit the Sitemap via Google Search Console

After you create and upload the sitemap for your website, the next step is to submit it for Google.

Because Google bot will have to read and analyze your sitemap files properly in order to index the URL of your website.

Follow the below steps to submit sitemaps through the search console.

Login to your Google search console account.

Go to Dashboard & Select your website property.

Choose Sitemaps under Index.

Enter the URL of your new sitemap file.

Here you must enter the exact correct URL path of your sitemap file. The idea here is to let Google know exactly in which directory and folder your sitemap file is present.

Next click on submit.

The sitemap file will be successfully submitted.

It is always advisable to submit sitemaps when you make any modifications and updates to your existing content pages. Because this would allow Google to fastly analyze the updated content.

Conclusion:

Of course, you can use the URL inspection feature to test and index web pages through the google search console. However, if you are submitting a lot of URL for indexing then it is better to submit the sitemap as well.

Sitemaps are an integral part of the website SEO. 

Sitemap security is also a very important thing.

You should ensure that the sitemap file has high security.

And make sure that you use only trusted tools to create sitemaps.

I hope you got some great information about sitemaps by reading this content.

If this blog was useful to you then please do share it on social media sites with your friends.

Thanks.