As our team started to write articles and tutorials on Google webmaster tool, then how it can be possible to leave topic of ‘Create Sitemap for WordPress Website‘. The best way to make you understand what is sitemap is your House, Yes as in your house you have the bedroom, study room, washroom, kitchen room and so on. So when you draw the map of your house that will be known as the site map, similarly in the case of a website and blogs the sitemap is the file which contents the number of pages, post, media is on your website.
Officially Website Sitemap is the file which consists of all the pages, posts, media, attachments in it, which helps Google and other search engines robot to crawl your website properly. Further sitemap file can be customized to decide whether which pages and folder should not be crawled and the priority of pages can also be set – so that Googlebot understand intelligently to crawl your pages.
In this tutorial, I will only explain how to create Sitemap and in further tutorials, I will explain to you where to use it and how to?
As there are two types of Website Sitemap HTML sitemap and XML sitemap and I will create both type of sitemap for customizing as well as CMS website like WordPress.
Manually Creating an HTML Sitemap
Step#1: Go to the root folder of your website, where the domain is parked. (For example: ask.syncsas.com/)
Step#2 : Create a file with name SITEMAP.html, .html is an default extension of HTML documents one can also use .htm also.
Step#3: Open sitemap.html file and start coding your own sitemap. Following is the example of sitemap.html
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd”>
<html>
<head>
<title>Site Map Page 1 – Generated by ask.syncsas.com</title>
<meta http-equiv=”Content-type” content=”text/html; charset=utf-8″ />
<style type=”text/css”>Put your desired style sheet code here
</style>
</head>
<body><h1>HTML Site Map</h1>
<h3><a href=”http://ask.syncsas.com”>Homepage</a>
Last updated: 2016, May 9
</h3>
<table cellpadding=”0″ cellspacing=”0″ border=”0″ width=”100%”><tr valign=”top”>
<td class=”lpart” colspan=”100″><div class=”lhead”>/
<span class=”lcount”>1 pages</span></div><table cellpadding=”0″ cellspacing=”0″ border=”0″ width=”100%”>
<tr><td class=”lpage”><a href=”http://ask.syncsas.com/” title=”BuzzMyCode – Buzzing Your Life”>BuzzMyCode – Buzzing Your Life</a></td></tr>
</table>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</body>
</html>
Done with manually creating HTML sitemap, this method can be used to create a sitemap for customizing the website and also for WordPress website. So there is no need to find manually creating the sitemap for WordPress website.
Html sitemap generator
You can use different website which provides the facility of generating HTML sitemap without doing any code. But after using any tool for sitemap generator, first, download your sitemap file and upload it in the root folder of your website hosting.
Note: Include only 100 links in a single page sitemap of HTML, for the website with large content create the number of different sitemap pages. Generally, HTML sitemap is used for displaying sitemap in websites, so for SEO purpose use XML sitemap.
Manually Creating an XML Sitemap
XML sitemap is the perfect solution to get your web pages in Google search index, Googlebot crawls the XML file easily as there is no need to install or view such files. To create XML sitemap manually, first collect the link on pages, posts, and attachments which you want to get crawled in search engines.
- Create a text file and save it with a .xml extension (ie. sitemap.xml)
- First lines of the file:
<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<urlset xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″>
- Create an entry for each URL. The <loc> tag is required, the others are optional.
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>
<lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.8</priority>
</url>
- Last line of the file:
</urlset>
- Upload the file to your server and then submit it to the search engines.
XML sitemap generator
Go to any sitemap generator website and enter the details like your website domain, a frequency of changes in pages, priority of pages and much more. After doing this a sitemap will be created download that file and save it in .xml and then upload sitemap.xml in the root folder of website hosting.
WordPress Plugin for Sitemap
Create Sitemap for WordPress Website
Yes, WordPress user can use this easy facility of creating the sitemap for their website, as there are many sitemap plugins available which can create dynamic sitemap whenever you updated with new content on your website. Plugins like ALL IN ONE SEO, YOAST SEO are the top plugins which provide the auto-generated sitemap, you don’t have to do anything just once setup the way in which you want your website sitemap. You can buy the different plugin from MYTHEMESHOP as they offer the best plugins with less price.
Step#1: Download any WordPress plugin which generates a sitemap.
Step#2: Do one-time setup of sitemap in WordPress plugin.
and here you go, now you just have to sit and all thing related with sitemap will be done by the plugin.
Hope you are benefited by this tutorial, if you want to learn more about sitemap then please do comment and also share the tutorial with needy bloggers and web developers.
