Creating a sitemap is an important step in getting your website listed on Google.
A sitemap serves as a table of contents for web pages, helping search engines like Google understand the structure of your site and index all of your important pages efficiently. For WordPress users, plugins like RankMath and Yoast SEO simple solutions to create and manage these important SEO elements.
In this guide, we will go through the process of creating a sitemap in WordPress using RankMath and Yoast SEO. We will also cover how to submit your sitemap to search engines and common mistakes to avoid. Our goal is to provide you with a comprehensive guide to help you SEO of your website to the next level.
Submitting a sitemap to search engines ensures that they know about every page on your site, especially those pages that are new or rarely linked to on your site. This is especially important for large sites with many pages, new sites that don't yet have many external links, or sites that contain many isolated or unlinked pages.
However: A sitemap is not a panacea for SEO. It doesn't guarantee that every page on your site will be indexed, but it does help search engines crawl and index your content more efficiently. However, the lack of a sitemap can result in certain parts of your website being overlooked, which in turn can affect your visibility in search results.
Here is more information about sitemaps (from Google)
RankMath and Yoast SEO are two of the leading SEO tools on the market, both offering a wide range of features to optimize your website for search engines. One of its highlights is the ability to create a complete and effective sitemap in just a few clicks.
Which plugin to use? We recommend RankMath.
RankMath is a powerful SEO plugin for WordPress that provides a user-friendly interface to simplify and optimize your SEO efforts, including creating and managing your sitemap. Setting up a sitemap with RankMath is a straightforward process that can help your website be more visible in search results.
Start by installing RankMath on your WordPress website. To do this, go to “Plugins” > “Add New” in the WordPress dashboard and search for “RankMath SEO”. Click “Install Now” and then “Activate.”
Once activated, RankMath will launch a setup wizard that will guide you through the basic configuration. During this process, you will be asked if you want to enable a sitemap for your website. Confirm this to proceed with sitemap creation.
Once the basic configuration is complete, navigate to RankMath > Sitemap Settings in your WordPress dashboard. Here you can customize various settings for your sitemap, including:
After adjusting your settings, you can check your sitemap by going to your website URL and /sitemap_index.xml
attach. Example: http://www.ihrewebsite.com/sitemap_index.xml
. Here you will find links to all of your site's sitemaps, including posts, pages, and media.
Yoast SEO is another popular plugin for WordPress that will help you improve your SEO efforts. One of the many features of Yoast SEO is the ability to automatically generate a sitemap for your website, which is an essential step in improving your SEO.
To get started with Yoast SEO, you must first install and activate the plugin. From the WordPress dashboard, go to Plugins > Add New, search for Yoast SEO, click Install Now, then click Activate.
Once activated, you can find the Yoast SEO settings under “SEO” in the WordPress dashboard. To access sitemap settings, navigate to SEO > General and go to the Features tab.
On the Features page, scroll down until you see the XML Sitemaps option. Make sure the switch is set to “On” to enable sitemap functionality.
After activating the sitemap feature, Yoast SEO automatically generates a sitemap for your website. To review your sitemap, click the question mark button next to the “XML Sitemaps” option and then click the “View XML Sitemap” link. This will take you to your sitemap, typically located at http://www.ihrewebsite.com/sitemap_index.xml
can be found.
Yoast SEO divides your sitemap into different sections, such as posts, pages, and categories, making it easier for search engines to crawl your site. If you want to customize, you can include or exclude specific content types or taxonomies via the Yoast SEO Posts and Taxonomies Settings.
After you have successfully created your sitemap using RankMath or Yoast SEO, the next step is to submit it to the major search engines.
Google is the most used search engine in the world and submitting your sitemap to Google Search Console is a must. Here's how to do it:
sitemap_index.xml
.Although Google has the largest share of the search engine market, you should also submit your sitemap to other search engines such as Bing. The process is similar to that of Google Search Console and can be done from the Bing Webmaster Tools dashboard.
Various issues can arise when creating and submitting sitemaps. Fortunately, most of these are easy to fix. Here are some of the most common errors and how to solve them:
You can get more help on the Google Sitemaps subpage
Questions/Concerns? Feel free to leave a comment.