Sitemap XML: Everything You Need to Know

Sitemap act as a bridge to connect our web pages to Google. In general, search engines find websites in web browser through sitemap and get indexed with it to deliver at the time of user’s query. Though it seems simple, the work and efficiency of sitemap is important all the time. It maybe a new or long-running website, the continuous optimization is mandatory in this case.

SophiyaMarch 15, 2023 & 18:00 [IST]

Sitemap XML

A Quick Definition: In every new beginning of a website, you have to intimate Google about all your important pages. XML sitemap is a way for it, which encourages search engine to recognize the pages of your site quickly.

This means submitting sitemap on the Google search console is a practice existed similar to how SEO is old.

The guidelines we followed in previous years are not so today but the significance of SEO and sitemap are similar.

"Using tons of SEO practices, we gradually raise the ranking and organic traffic from 0 to peak. This is one among them mandatory for any kind of site and industry"

If you want to learn more about sitemap and its hidden info, move on your reading below:

What is Sitemap?

A sitemap is simply a file with your website information like images, videos, pages and other associated details to make Google know you clearly. With this practice, search engines find your site and start crawl you more efficiently. It tells Google about all the valuable information of your site and the way it helps users.

Once it understand your website’s goodness, then getting crawled and indexed is far easy. Simply explaining, the content discovery of Google is hassle-free and quick if the website structure is delivered clearly.


When You Need a Sitemap?

It’s a common query that generating a sitemap is essential for any website. To discover your website and let it be crawled and indexed is possible only by submitting the site info. It may include an enormous range of files, images, videos and files, so this is deem important to give such details for easy discovering.

The sitemap is essential if:

Your site is new with a few external links – Bot and web crawlers spot your site with the links from one page to another. It mightn’t discover the pages with no links to other sites.

Your site is sizeable – In a large size website, it’s somewhat difficult to figure out whether every pages of the site are linked at least with any one site. It is more likely to result in not discovering any few of your new pages.

Your site has a rich source of content – Google take advantage of the rest of media content in your site like videos or photos from sitemap when crawling.


Types of XML Sitemap

Search engine support different types of XML sitemap for different types of content and it includes:

  • Images

  • Videos

  • Google News

If your website has this kind of content, create and dedicate sitemaps to Google for crawling. By general, sitemap has a certain size limit such as 50,000 to 50 MB URLs. If your URL size goes beyond this limit, then you need to generate multiple sitemaps.

In such a case, sitemap Index would be used which list all your sitemaps.


How to Submit your Sitemap to Google?

Of course, Google crawlers find your sitemap and start crawl on its own, but this is more fair to submit the sitemap URLs on your own.

It is because:

  • Speed up the process associated with crawling your sitemap

  • Helps point out the errors when Google is linked with your sitemap

  • Getting crawled and indexed is quicker

However, sitemap submission is not so bustling as you can do simple and easy with available plugins. This could be practiced on Google Search Console.

At first, open your Search Console and you can see the Sitemap in left side menu of the dashboard.

Just copy the link of your sitemap and paste it in the “Add a new sitemap” field and tap submit button.

If you are maintaining multiple sitemaps for your site, don’t want to submit one-by-one separately. Submitting the index sitemap is enough that list all your sitemaps to Google clearly.

Remember, this is not a process getting completed in a couple of seconds or minutes. Once it is done successfully, you can notice status like success (i.e) green in color.


Benefits of Submitting Sitemap

  • Integrating your data on sitemap encourage search engine to find more about your webpages. So it give you benefits like:

  • Search engine prioritize your website when crawling. Using tags on XML sitemap, you can tell Google which pages are far important on your site and it allow bot to focus mainly on those pages.

  • It helps listing all your pages of a website to Google. And it mayn’t find manually search engine without the serious involvement of sitemap.

  • You still have two or more optional tags like “lastmod” and “changefreq” that provides extra data to search engine and paves the way for easy crawling.


Last Line

Sitemap submission is an essential part in technical SEO creates curiosity to Google to find your site. Though we have thousands of parameters to look at when leveraging SEO ranking, sitemap is the major aspects among all. Anyhow, I’ve covered the maximum things integrated with this practice and hopefully it is useful for you.


A Quick Definition: In every new beginning of a website, you have to intimate Google about all your important pages. XML sitemap is a way for it, which encourages search engine to recognize the pages of your site quickly.

This means submitting sitemap on the Google search console is a practice existed similar to how SEO is old.

The guidelines we followed in previous years are not so today but the significance of SEO and sitemap are similar.

"Using tons of SEO practices, we gradually raise the ranking and organic traffic from 0 to peak. This is one among them mandatory for any kind of site and industry"

If you want to learn more about sitemap and its hidden info, move on your reading below:

What is Sitemap?

A sitemap is simply a file with your website information like images, videos, pages and other associated details to make Google know you clearly. With this practice, search engines find your site and start crawl you more efficiently. It tells Google about all the valuable information of your site and the way it helps users.

Once it understand your website’s goodness, then getting crawled and indexed is far easy. Simply explaining, the content discovery of Google is hassle-free and quick if the website structure is delivered clearly.

When You Need a Sitemap?

It’s a common query that generating a sitemap is essential for any website. To discover your website and let it be crawled and indexed is possible only by submitting the site info. It may include an enormous range of files, images, videos and files, so this is deem important to give such details for easy discovering.

The sitemap is essential if:

Your site is new with a few external links – Bot and web crawlers spot your site with the links from one page to another. It mightn’t discover the pages with no links to other sites.

Your site is sizeable – In a large size website, it’s somewhat difficult to figure out whether every pages of the site are linked at least with any one site. It is more likely to result in not discovering any few of your new pages.

Your site has a rich source of content – Google take advantage of the rest of media content in your site like videos or photos from sitemap when crawling.

Types of XML Sitemap

Search engine support different types of XML sitemap for different types of content and it includes:

  • Images

  • Videos

  • Google News

If your website has this kind of content, create and dedicate sitemaps to Google for crawling. By general, sitemap has a certain size limit such as 50,000 to 50 MB URLs. If your URL size goes beyond this limit, then you need to generate multiple sitemaps.

In such a case, sitemap Index would be used which list all your sitemaps.

How to Submit your Sitemap to Google?

Of course, Google crawlers find your sitemap and start crawl on its own, but this is more fair to submit the sitemap URLs on your own.

It is because:

  • Speed up the process associated with crawling your sitemap

  • Helps point out the errors when Google is linked with your sitemap

  • Getting crawled and indexed is quicker

However, sitemap submission is not so bustling as you can do simple and easy with available plugins. This could be practiced on Google Search Console.

At first, open your Search Console and you can see the Sitemap in left side menu of the dashboard.

Just copy the link of your sitemap and paste it in the “Add a new sitemap” field and tap submit button.

If you are maintaining multiple sitemaps for your site, don’t want to submit one-by-one separately. Submitting the index sitemap is enough that list all your sitemaps to Google clearly.

Remember, this is not a process getting completed in a couple of seconds or minutes. Once it is done successfully, you can notice status like success (i.e) green in color.

Benefits of Submitting Sitemap

  • Integrating your data on sitemap encourage search engine to find more about your webpages. So it give you benefits like:

  • Search engine prioritize your website when crawling. Using tags on XML sitemap, you can tell Google which pages are far important on your site and it allow bot to focus mainly on those pages.

  • It helps listing all your pages of a website to Google. And it mayn’t find manually search engine without the serious involvement of sitemap.

  • You still have two or more optional tags like “lastmod” and “changefreq” that provides extra data to search engine and paves the way for easy crawling.

Last Line

Sitemap submission is an essential part in technical SEO creates curiosity to Google to find your site. Though we have thousands of parameters to look at when leveraging SEO ranking, sitemap is the major aspects among all. Anyhow, I’ve covered the maximum things integrated with this practice and hopefully it is useful for you.

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