Summary
1. What is the sitemap?
Think of a sitemap as a file or a digital map in which all your website pages and information on them are in an easy to read list. A sitemap's purpose is to help search engines such as Google to crawl your website and help users quickly navigate your website. There are different types of sitemaps, but the XML sitemap is the important one for your SEO.
The XML contains information about each subpage URL that you have. Some of the information the map contains is when a webpage was updated or how often the site has been changed.
It is helpful to think that the sitemap is a spiderweb for your website that helps the spiders (Google) reach the correct URL faster. As such the quicker the spider gets to a certain URL, the better the SEO results are.
2. Why do I need a site map?
Having an XML sitemap allows data and keywords to be evaluated faster, which means that changes to your website will be found quicker and will be better evaluated by search engines. When you are optimizing your website for search engines, you want the search engines to notice all the great changes you made so that you can reach those top rankings in Google! Therefore, it is important to create and submit an XML sitemap so it can be found quickly and efficiently.
3. How can rankingCoach help me with the sitemap?
With the customized tasks to help you optimize your website better, rankingCoach will also create a task with tutorials on how you can create a sitemap for your website.
Depending on the CMS, each website builder will have different steps to create a sitemap for the website. rankingCoach provides tailor-made videos and instructions based on your CMS that will create a task for you with instructions on what is needed to create a sitemap.
If your website is made with some of the most popular CMSs, the task will come with a video tutorial that shows you exactly how to do it. But no worries, if there is no video, the task will have written instructions.
4. Where do I add my sitemap?
It is important that you add your sitemap to Google Search Console after creation as it will help Google find and navigate the map quicker. Before getting to this step, rankingCoach helps you with creating a Google Search Console if you do not have one yet.
As for creating the task for the sitemap, rankingCoach will create a task for Google Search Console and will show you in the task exactly how you can submit your sitemap.
The status of the sitemap in the Google Search Console will tell you if you successfully submitted your sitemap. The status can either be: “Success”, “Has errors” and “Couldn’t fetch”. In case you see that there has been an error or that it could not be fetched, it means that Google encountered an error when attempting to crawl a URL in your sitemap.
To understand which error it is and how you can solve it, Google Search Console has a complete error list to help you solve this problem. In order to see the error list and the solutions, please click here.
For any further questions, please contact us, we are happy to help you!
Want to learn more about rankingCoach, check out our article and help pages: https://help.rankingcoach.com/en