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An undisputed fact for anyone working in the field of Online marketing, that search engine visitors are absolutely the most important and best among all methods
Therefore, it was imperative for every website owner to make their website optimized for the way Search engines.
This is generally called the science of SEO Or search engine optimization.
If you want to get good visitors from search engines, you must start by letting search engines know about the links on your website,
And then crawl them well, and then index them.
In this article, we will talk about a very important factor among the factors of improving crawling and indexing for websites.
Today we will talk about sitemap .
In this article we will answer these questions:-
-What is a sitemap and what is its importance for every website?
-What does a sitemap consist of?
-How do I create a sitemap for my website easily?
-How do I submit the sitemap to the Google search engine through Google Webmaster Tools
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What is a sitemap and what is its function for my website?
A sitemap is a file uploaded to the root directory of your website files.
This file contains all the links on the website, to help the Googlebot and other search engine crawlers crawl your website.
This file is usually in XML format
This file contains some special signals for website links, including:
-Indicating the last time a change was made to each web page.
-What is the rate of change in each web page, whether daily, weekly, or annually...etc.
-What is the importance of each website link.
This gives search engines a guide to the nature of the website pages and their links.
Just as you can create a sitemap for website pages, you can also create a sitemap for videos and images within your website.
What is the importance of a sitemap for my website
According to Google itself, the sitemap has special importance in the following cases:-
-Your website is new, and you want an easy way to introduce search engines to it.
-Your website is large in size, with a large number of internal pages.
-Your website pages are not linked to each other correctly.
Or there are certain pages on your website that are not linked to the rest of the pages.
In summary, the importance of a sitemap lies in the fact that it provides a clear, direct, and explicit map for Google's spiders and other search engine spiders.
For the purpose of crawling all website pages correctly and more intelligently.
To get better results for your website.
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What does a sitemap consist of?
Any sitemap consists of a very simple code as shown below.
This sitemap is in XML format. The first and second lines of the code are not repeated again in the sitemap and are almost constant in every sitemap.
that you create in XML format.
After that, you will find that each link on the website contains almost the same code with the link itself changing.
Here is a breakdown of the code that the sitemap contains for each link.
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-You will find that any code for any link starts with this small symbol
-After that, you will find in the line following the small symbol, a code that starts and ends with this tag . This line contains the link that
this part of the code refers to.
-In the following line, you will find code that begins and ends with this tag .
This is a signal through which the sitemap informs search engines of the last time a change or modification was made to this URL.
-In the following line, you will find code that begins and ends with this tag .
It indicates the rate of change for each page on the website, whether daily, weekly, etc.
-In the line following the change rate, you will find another line that begins and ends with this tag , which indicates the specific priority
of this link.
This priority is measured from zero to one.
For example, the priority of your website's homepage will be set to one.
Other pages might be set to 0.7 or 0.8, etc.
-The code for any link ends as it began with this tag
-At the very end of the sitemap, you will find that it also concludes as it started, with this small tag .
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Illustrative example of sitemap structure
The screenshot displayed above is a part of the sitemap for the Al-Rabihon website.
By studying this part, you will find at the beginning the first and second lines of code, which are fixed and do not change in any XML sitemap.
After that, an additional line begins and ends with extra tags, each on its own line.
This is a reference to the website through which the sitemap was generated.
Next is the part containing the homepage code of the Al-Rabihon website.
In the first line, you will find the URL of the homepage, followed by the last date the content of this URL was modified, as shown before you: April 27th,
In 2016.
This is followed by the line specifying the time interval for content changes on this URL.
As is clear before you, the change rate is daily, as new content is added to the site every day, and this change appears on the homepage.
Because it contains links to new articles in the most-watched section and everything new at the top of the homepage.
Since this is the website's homepage, the crawling priority for it has been set to the highest degree, which is one.
The code ended as it began with the url tag.
Here, it is essential to point out something extremely important: the sitemap does not force Google or other search engines to crawl
your website in a specific way.
Rather, it is merely a guide through which you provide search engines with information about your website's links.
Google and other search engines have the right to follow this guide or not.
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How do you create a sitemap for your website easily and simply?
There are many websites that offer sitemap generation services, some of which are free and others paid.
In this article, I will not list the most important websites that offer this service.
Instead, I will talk about my personal experience and the website I personally use to create the sitemap for Al-Rabihon.
This is the link to the website, and as for how to use it, it is extremely easy.
First, here is a screenshot from the website, and then I will explain how to use it.
All you need to do to get a sitemap for your website is to enter your website URL without any extensions.
So that it looks like this: http://yourwebsite.com
In the following field, you must choose the time interval for adding or changing your website content; it is preferable to choose daily.
The next option is Use this date/time:
In this case, the website will select today's date as the last date changes were made to the site.
In the priority section, choose Automatically Calculated Priority.
This means letting the website automatically calculate the priority of each link, and then click the start button.
Shortly, based on the size of your website's links, you will get the sitemap in various formats and extensions.
Download it in XML format and save it on your computer, then upload it to the root directory of your website files on the hosting server.
(You can consult a specialist if you lack knowledge or experience in doing this.)
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How to submit a sitemap to the Google search engine
You are supposed to have an account in Google Webmaster Tools here.
However, no worries, as you can create a new account using a Gmail account.
After creating the account, follow these steps:
1- Go to the crawl tab.
2- Click on the small arrow next to it.
3- A drop-down menu will appear, choose sitemaps from it.
4- Click on the add/test sitemaps button at the top right.
5- Enter the name of the file you previously uploaded to the hosting, which will most likely be named sitemap.xml.
6- Then click the submit button.
7- Wait for Google to crawl the website sitemap and index the links it contains.
1 Comment
Thank you for the valuable information