As SEO returns to its "good old days," many "SEO companies" led quite successful lives by "sending your website to thousands of search engines." This, although not a very stable tactic or method for achieving SEO nirvana, modern SEO offers opportunities to index our content—in all shapes, sizes, and formats—in search engines, allowing us to extract the maximum from our capabilities.

When it comes to SEO visibility and bots at the indexing stage, we typically control what is in search engines through the use of robots.txt and meta robots tags. But it is also equally important to consider the content/URLs that we provide to search engines.

A long time ago, the best practice was to create an HTML sitemap at least for all main pages and link that HTML sitemap to the footer of all site pages. This allows search engines to retrieve the site's URLs from any page.

Then, XML sitemaps emerged. Extensible Markup Language (XML) is the preferred tool for data processing by search engines.

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With the available tool, a webmaster can provide search engines with data about the pages on the site they wish to index, as well as information about the last update of the page, as well as the priority or hierarchy of the site’s content.

Let’s explore the first steps in creating a sitemap for different types of content.

Creating a Standard XML Sitemap

Below is the anatomy of an entry for a standard XML sitemap URL.

<url>

<loc> http://www.example.com/mypage </loc>

<lastmod> 2019-10-10 </lastmod>

<changefreq> aylık </changefreq>

<priority> 1 </priority>

< / url>

This shows the fields that allow you to provide additional information about the desired URLs for indexing, as well as additional information about the URLs.

Some content management systems (CMS) allow the generation of dynamic or automatically created sitemaps. Is this easy? Yes. Error-free? No. More on that shortly.

If your CMS does not offer a sitemap generation feature, you will need to create an XML sitemap from scratch. To avoid the manual effort, as it would be time-consuming, there are tools available for this.

There are many XML sitemap generators. Some are free but typically have a limit on the number of URLs they can crawl, so you need to watch out for that.

The best sitemap generators are usually paid. One very simple tool that can be used to generate sitemaps is Sitemap Writer Pro, which costs $25.

If you choose to use other tools, pick one that allows you to review the crawled URLs and easily remove duplicate URLs, dynamic parameters, excluded URLs, etc. Don’t forget, you only want search engines to index the pages you’ve selected.

How to Upload and Submit the Sitemap?

Once the standard XML sitemap is created, you need to upload the file to your site. This file should have a page name related to the same topic, such as /sitemap.xml, and should be placed directly in the root of your site.

Once done, go to Google Search Console and submit the sitemap:

Then do the same with Bing Webmaster Tools:

Yes, they can find the sitemap on your site, but it's a good idea to submit this information to search engines and give them the ability to report indexing issues in Google and Bing.

How to Find Sitemap Errors?

You’ve provided the URLs in the preferred XML markup to the search engines, but how do they index the content? Are there any issues? A great feature of Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools is that you can review what the search engines may have missed.

Google offers much better transparency regarding sitemap issues compared to Bing, which provides only small amounts of data for review.

In this case, we received an error that we submitted the XML sitemap, but the URLs in it were not included in the robots.txt file.

It’s important to pay attention to these errors and warnings. Search engines may not even be able to read the XML sitemap. Also, we can collect information on incorrectly excluded URLs in robots.txt.

Regarding dynamically generated sitemaps, their downside is that they often contain many URLs that have been intentionally excluded from search engine visibility through robots.txt. The last thing we want is to tell search engines to crawl a given page, while at the same time preventing it from being crawled.

Monitoring the sitemap is essential for any SEO campaign. In its most basic functions, it will show you how many URLs you’ve provided in the XML sitemap, how many of those are indexed in Google, and when the sitemap was last processed.

Wash, Rinse, Repeat

You may have reviewed the processes above and be confident in the transparency and distribution of your site's URLs to search engines. However, in addition to standard XML sitemaps, these search engines will also accept information about your site's images, videos, news, and mobile content.

In this regard, these types of sitemaps can be created, placed on the site, and submitted in the same way as standard XML sitemaps. Additionally, by using the preferred tool I mentioned earlier, you will have the ability to create these sitemaps as well.

Anatomy of XML Sitemaps Supported

Image XML Sitemaps

Images on the site and data about their location on the page are provided in:

<url>

<loc> http://www.example.com/mypage </ loc>

<lastmod> 2013/10/10 </ lastmod>

<changefreq> aylık </ changefreq>

<öncelik> 1 </ öncelik>

< image: image>

<image: loc>

http://www.example.com/images/myfirstimage.gif

</ image: loc>

</ image: image>

<görüntü: görüntü>

<görüntü: loc>

http: // www.example.com/images/mysecondimage.gif

</ resim: loc>

</ image: image>

</ url>

XML Sitemaps for Videos

XML sitemaps for videos provide information about the location of your video pages, search engine instructions, and details such as video titles, descriptions, access levels, and embedding options.

http://www.example.com/mypage </loc>

<lastmod> 2013-05-06 </lastmod>

<changefreq> aylık </changefreq>

<priority> 0.5 </priority>

< video: video>

<video: content_loc>

https://youtube.com/watch?v=W10j21236%3Den_US

</ video: content_loc>

<video: player_loc

allow_embed = "evet"> http://www.site.com/ videoplayer.swf? video = 123 </ video: player_loc>

<video: thumbnail_loc>

http://img.youtube.com/vi/W1021236=1/default.jpg

</ video: thumbnail_loc>

<video: title> Videom Adı </ video: title>

<video: Description>

Videom Açıklaması

</ video:açıklaması>

<video: derecelendirme> 2 </ video: derecelendirme>

<video: görüntüleme_sayısı> 498 </ video: görüntüleme_sayrı>

<video: publication_date> 2013-05-06 </

video: yayın_tarihi> <video: family_friendly> evet </ video: family_friendly>

<video: süre> 10 </ video: süre>

<video: expiration_date> 2016-05-06 </ video: expiration_date>

<video: needs_subscription> hayır </ video: needs_subscription >

</ video: video>

</url>

Mobile XML Sitemaps

Do you have mobile pages in a specific directory on your site? Allow search engines to gather more information about your URLs aimed at mobile users.

<url>

<loc> http://www.example.com/mobile/oneofmymobilepages </loc>

<lastmod> 2013-10-10 </lastmod>

<changefreq> aylık </changefreq>

<priority> 0.8 </ öncelik >

<mobil: mobil />

</url>

News XML Sitemaps

News websites can provide information about news articles, their location on the site, as well as the type of news, language, and accessibility.

<url>

<loc> http://www.example.com/news/mynewsarticle </loc>

<news: news>

<news: yayın>

<news: name> Haber Sitem </ news: name>

<news: dil> tr </ news: dil>

</ news: yayın>

<news: erişim> Abonelik </ news: erişim>

<news: türler> PressRelease, Blo </ news: türler>

<news: publication_date> 2013-10- 10 </ news: publication_date>

<news: title> Haberin Başlığı </ news: anahtar kelimeler>

</ news: news>

</url>

Conclusion

Especially today, no matter how much effort is put into developing great content, it is crucial to take extra time to ensure that you've done everything possible for complete indexing to get the full value from your efforts.