Explanation of sitemap and how to add it to your site properly 2023
Sitemap - In order for your site pages to be indexed correctly in Google, you need to create a sitemap for your site and submit this page to Google for indexing your site pages, whether it is articles (as in news sites and blogs), or products ( As it is in online stores).
In this article, we will learn about the explanation of the sitemap and how to add it to your site so that your site is indexed correctly, and is ready to appear in the search results.
What is a sitemap?
A sitemap is an XML file that contains all links to pages, images, videos of the site, and any other files, and organizes them in a manner that is easy to understand for any search engine such as Google, as the search engine reads the file and accesses all pages of your site based on the information in this file.
XML files are generally designed to transfer and store data, and they are files similar to HTML files that show your pages on the browser, but the difference between XML and HTML is that they are files that carry information in an organized manner and are not responsible for appearing graphically (such as the page format of this article).
Thus, XML files display the same contents of the site, but in an organized manner, to search engines.
The maximum number of links that a single sitemap file can contain is 50,000 links, and to know the form of links within the sitemap file for our site, for example, see the following figure, and here it should be noted that there can be more than one sitemap file because only 50,000 links are allowed in the file One is circumvented and more than one file is made.
If you view the source file of the XML file by pressing the right mouse button, and then click View Page source.
Note that because the maximum number of links that can be found in a single sitemap file cannot exceed fifty thousand links, the sitemap is divided into several files.
Explanation of the robots.txt file:
In order for your site pages to be indexed by the search engine, web spiders (bot, robot, or spider) are sent to access the sites to know their content and index them in their databases to show us when searching the engine for any topic.
The robots.txt file helps to do this task, as it is used to indicate to search engines the pages that should be crawled (crawl) and the pages that do not need to be indexed by the search engine, in other words, which pages are allowed to be indexed by Google and which are not allowed to be indexed.
Each search engine has its own spiders, so Google has its own spiders, the Bing engine has its own spiders, and the same applies to analysis and indexing tools (Alexa, for example), as it also has its own spiders.
Sometimes you may need to block crawling and indexing spiders for some sites in order to increase the security of your site from being analyzed by competitors, or to prevent access to some pages that you do not want to be indexed in the search engine.
How to create a sitemap for your site:
If your site is based on WordPress, you can create a sitemap easily with some plugins like Google XML Sitemaps or SEO by Yoast plugin.
We will explain this task through the yoast plugin that you often use to improve your site’s SEO. With the same plugin, you can create a sitemap in an easy and direct manner.