what is a sitemap and how do we use a sitemap for the purpose of seo
so a sitemap is a list of pages on a website within a domain and there’s different types of site maps there’s xml sitemaps
there’s html sitemaps there’s image sitemaps but the most common type of sitemap you’re going to see on a website is an xml sitemap and the whole purpose of the site map is so that google or any crawler really knows what to crawl so here we can go to Article.com forward slash
sitemap.xml and in here the sitemap will show a few different things mainly what i’ve been changing the most frequently on my website so here you can see this seo audit checklist we can scroll down and see some of the other pages that were optimized or or updated like the seo
without links article i made now this is helpful because search engines want to know what is actually updating on your website they want to know what are the important pages to crawl
and sitemaps help search engines do that that’s why in the robots.txt of your website what the first thing google checks you should put your sitemap in here with the sitemap colon and then
wherever your sitemap’s located so that the search engines know what to crawl know what pages to crawl now you don’t necessarily need a site map it’s not crucial but it is helpful and it helps
search engines know again what you’re updating and what they need to crawl first on your website you can also submit your sitemap to something like google search console and if you
have any errors on your sitemap google will tell you in google search console here we can go to sitemaps add our sitemap and then below what will happen is we’ll actually see which pages are
discovered you can see i have about 18 urls on my new version of my website now after you let this sit for a little bit it should actually let you see the index coverage which means it’ll let you see what pages were picked up but for now we’ll just leave it so the fact that google has site maps in
in their google search console tool and and they do want to see a site map and they want you to submit it it is an indication that you should have one for sure there’s a couple different ways you can create site maps you can use a plug-in you can use an auto-generated tool to auto-generate
your sitemap but ideally i would go to the phase one portion of this checklist so that you can watch the full tutorial on how i actually generate my sitemaps
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