How does Sitemaps Help Search Engines

Sitemaps help search engines successfully crawl your website by making it easier to find all the site’s pages and links. A sitemap is not required for a website, but it can help improve search engine optimization.

What is a Sitemap?

A sitemap informs search engines that individual pages on your site are new or updated and are available for crawling. The sitemap protocol consists of an XML file that includes your website URLs and three other optional pieces of information for each page:

How often the URL is updated.
The last time the URL was updated.
A priority of the URL relative to the other pages on the site.

Sitemaps help ensure all new and difficult-to-find pages are indexed quickly and completely, and are particularly useful for websites that are difficult for search engines to crawl and index effectively. Your website benefits from applying a sitemap if it:

Is modified frequently.
Uses Javascript of Flash® for navigation or content display.
Contains a large database or archive of pages that may be accessible only through a search function.

Where do I put the Sitemap?

Make sure your sitemap is in the root, or top-level directory of your Web server.

Can I exclude pages from my Sitemap?

Yes, you can exclude specific pages of your website from your sitemap. On the Search Engine Visibility Sitemap page, select the pages you want to exclude, and then click Exclude Selected.

Create a Sitemap in WordPress

You can use the following steps to make sure your WordPress site has a sitemap to help improve SEO ranking.

There are many plugins that can be used for this, we will cover installing the Yoast SEO plugin. If you decide to use a different plugin, be sure you choose one that is actively being maintained.