You must have noticed various old days websites offering a link (on homepage) titled as ‘Sitemap’. That link directs the visitor to a HTML page offering all important links present on that website. A sitemap generally contains a hierarchical or un-hierarchical list of all links but these days adding any sitemap link for visitors is not of much importance. Today sitemaps are mostly generated in XML (not HTML) and their target is search engines (not website visitors).
Sitemap has now become a way to tell search engines about your website content like posts, pages and the new post types you generate so that they can frequently update your website results whenever you create any new category and post type etc. Sitemaps doesn’t better your search results ranking instead they only helps search engines to easily crawl the content on your website.
How To Create XML Sitemap For Your Website?
Popular SEO plugin, WordPress SEO by Yoast already provides you function for generating XML sitemap of your website. All you have to do is visit its admin page for XML sitemap, include and exclude post types, media and other content and it will automatically generate the sitemap.
Screenshot showing a sitemap generated with ‘Google XML Sitemaps’ plugin:
Another popular way of generating XML sitemap in WordPress is Google XML Sitemaps plugin. Install and activate it then visit Dashboard -> Settings -> XML-Sitemap page, include and exclude post types, media, taxonomies etc. Select your options and click ‘Update Options‘ button.
Also checkout our tutorial on special Google sitemap plugins for images, videos and mobile.