In this tutorial we will show you how to create and validate a Sitemap for your website. If you don’t have a website yet, you can sign up here for our feature-rich hosting account and easily create your website within minutes!
Before we continue with the exact steps of generating your Sitemap, we will provide you with some general information on Sitemaps.
What is a Sitemap?
For the purposes of this tutorial we will focus on Sitemap Protocol 0.9 introduced by SiteMaps.org which is a standard, validated and used by Google and most other search engines.
A Sitemap allows you to create a file hosted among the other files in your account that informs the search engines of all pages your website contains. In other words, it provides the search engine with detailed information about the content of your website.
Although Sitemaps are mainly used to improve the index process of your website by search engines, they can be used to provide accessibility to certain pages as well. For example, pages that are not accessible via your menus, can be indexed by the search engine if you want.
The Sitemap does not affect the normal way crawler bots index your page – it just extends the visibility and accessibility of your content.
Please note, that having a Sitemap on your website does not guarantee that a certain pages will be indexed and included by the search engines. Neither it affects your page rank.
Sitemap Tutorial covers the following topics:
- What is the Sitemap format : Checkout this section for more information about the sitemap default format and how to use the necessary tags in the XML for it.
- How does an example Sitemap look like : In this part of the tutorial a sample Sitemap is presented. It can be used as a starting point for your website sitemap.
- How to have multiple Sitemaps and Sitemap index : More information about certain limitations and how to include a large number of URLs in a SiteMap can be found in this part of the tutorial.
- How to validate your Sitemaps : This section includes basic information how to validate the sitemap for your website.
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