{"id":1600,"date":"2018-05-06T19:02:39","date_gmt":"2018-05-07T02:02:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ultimatewb.com\/blog\/?p=1600"},"modified":"2024-01-17T12:35:26","modified_gmt":"2024-01-17T20:35:26","slug":"why-you-need-a-sitemap-for-your-website-search-engine-ranking-seo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ultimatewb.com\/blog\/1600\/why-you-need-a-sitemap-for-your-website-search-engine-ranking-seo\/","title":{"rendered":"Why you need a sitemap for your website search engine ranking &#038; SEO"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.ultimatewb.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sitemap-search-engine-seo-indexing.png\">    <picture>\n                <img src=\"https:\/\/www.ultimatewb.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sitemap-search-engine-seo-indexing.png\"\n             srcset=\"https:\/\/www.ultimatewb.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sitemap-search-engine-seo-indexing.png 800w, https:\/\/www.ultimatewb.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sitemap-search-engine-seo-indexing-300x131.png 300w, https:\/\/www.ultimatewb.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sitemap-search-engine-seo-indexing-768x336.png 768w\"             sizes=\"(max-width: 600px) 100vw, (max-width: 1200px) 75vw, 1200px\"\n             width=\"800\"\n             height=\"350\"\n             alt=\"sitemap-search-engine-seo-indexing\"\n             loading=\"lazy\"             decoding=\"async\"\n             class=\"wp-image-4371\" >\n    <\/picture>\n    <\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n<p>A sitemap is just like how it sounds &#8211; it&#8217;s a roadmap for search engines\u00a0that lead them to your webpages. It&#8217;s a list of\u00a0your website&#8217;s individual page urls,in an XML file, so that Google and other search engines can crawl and index &#8211; and rank &#8211; your site&#8217;s pages more easily.\u00a0 There&#8217;s a good reason to make a sitemap for your website!\u00a0 If you want a high search engine ranking to direct traffic to your website from user internet searches, it can be a very important part in your website&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ultimatewb.com\/seo-tool-tips\/how-to-get-your-website-first-page-of-google\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">SEO (search engine optimization)<\/a>,<\/p>\n<p>Besides the page url, sitemaps can provide\u00a0important and useful\u00a0metadata, i.e. information about each webpage, such as when the page was last updated.\u00a0 If a page has been updated, you want the new page to be crawled again.\u00a0 So, having a sitemap also makes it easier for search engines to know when to recrawl your webpages.<\/p>\n<p>But, do you <em>really<\/em> need a sitemap?\u00a0 &#8230;Like using the road signs to get around, or a road map or asking directions.\u00a0 \u00a0 According to Google:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p style=\"color: #212121;\">If your site\u2019s pages are properly linked, our web crawlers can usually discover most of your site. Even so, a sitemap can improve the crawling of your site, particularly if your site meets one of the following criteria:<\/p>\n<ul style=\"color: #212121;\">\n<li><strong>Your site is really large.<\/strong>\u00a0As a result, it\u2019s more likely Google web crawlers might overlook crawling some of your new or recently updated pages.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Your site has a large archive of content pages that are isolated or well not linked to each other.<\/strong>\u00a0If you site pages do not naturally reference each other, you can list them in a sitemap to ensure that Google does not overlook some of your pages.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Your site is new and has few external links to it.<\/strong>\u00a0Googlebot and other web crawlers crawl the web by following links from one page to another. As a result, Google might not discover your pages if no other sites link to them.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Your site uses rich media content, is shown in Google News, or uses other sitemaps-compatible annotations.\u00a0<\/strong>Google can take additional information from sitemaps into account for search, where appropriate.<br \/>(via Google: <a href=\"https:\/\/support.google.com\/webmasters\/answer\/156184?hl=en\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Learn about sitemaps<\/a>)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>While there&#8217;s no guarantee that Google or other search engines will crawl and index all your listed webpages, usually your website will benefit from having a sitemap, so why not?<\/p>\n<p>Creating and maintaining a sitemap is easy with Ultimate Web Builder Full and Ultimate Web Builder Lite software &#8211; with the built-in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ultimatewb.com\/sitemap-generator-tool\/easy-automatic-create-website-sitemap\">sitemap generator<\/a>!\u00a0 You just choose which types of pages (content, listings, photos, videos, classifieds, etc.) you want included in your website sitemap, and whether to include each page&#8217;s modified date, and the generator does the job for you.\u00a0 You can choose to run the sitemap generator manually, or have it automatically run for you &#8211; and automatically update your sitemap &#8211;\u00a0 by setting up the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ultimatewb.com\/web-hosting-cpanel-tutorials\/how-to-configure-cron-jobs-automatic-scripts-from-web-hosting-control-panel\">&#8220;cron job&#8221;, or automatic script<\/a>, for it on your web hosting control panel.\u00a0 Again, no coding required for this either &#8211; just copy\/paste a line for the setup.\u00a0 Easy peasy!<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_1601\" style=\"width: 610px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\">    <picture>\n                <img src=\"https:\/\/www.ultimatewb.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sitemap-settings.jpg\"\n             srcset=\"https:\/\/www.ultimatewb.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sitemap-settings.jpg 600w, https:\/\/www.ultimatewb.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sitemap-settings-300x240.jpg 300w\"             sizes=\"(max-width: 600px) 100vw, (max-width: 1200px) 75vw, 1200px\"\n             width=\"600\"\n             height=\"480\"\n             alt=\"sitemap-settings\"\n             loading=\"lazy\"             decoding=\"async\"\n             class=\"wp-image-1601 size-full\" >\n    <\/picture>\n    <p id=\"caption-attachment-1601\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Sitemap Generator, Settings<\/p><\/div>\n<div style=\"width: 660px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.ultimatewb.com\/images\/cron-jobs-automatic-scripts.jpg\" alt=\"Cron Jobs (Automatic Scripts), web hosting control panel, cPanel\" width=\"650\" height=\"261\" \/><p class=\"wp-caption-text\">Web Hosting Control Panel, Cron Jobs<\/p><\/div>\n<p>Related: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ultimatewb.com\/rss-feed-generator-tool\/easy-automatic-create-website-rss-feed\">How To Easily &amp; Automatically Create An RSS Feed For Your Website<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Are you ready to design &amp; build your own website? Learn more about\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.ultimatewb.com\/\">UltimateWB<\/a>! We also offer\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.ultimatewb.com\/web-design-packages\">web design packages<\/a>\u00a0if you would like your website designed and built for you.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A sitemap is just like how it sounds &#8211; it&#8217;s a roadmap for search engines\u00a0that lead them to your webpages. It&#8217;s a list of\u00a0your website&#8217;s individual page urls,in an XML file, so that Google and other search engines can crawl &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ultimatewb.com\/blog\/1600\/why-you-need-a-sitemap-for-your-website-search-engine-ranking-seo\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,781],"tags":[860,1005,1003,859,1008,1006,1007,12,11,218,221,1004,867],"class_list":["post-1600","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-search-engine-optimization-seo","category-website-traffic","tag-automatic-script","tag-automatic-sitemap","tag-create-sitemap","tag-cron-job","tag-meta-data","tag-search-engine-crawl","tag-search-engine-omptimization","tag-search-engine-ranking","tag-seo","tag-sitemap","tag-sitemap-generator","tag-update-sitemap","tag-xml"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatewb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1600"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatewb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatewb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatewb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatewb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1600"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatewb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1600\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4379,"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatewb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1600\/revisions\/4379"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatewb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1600"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatewb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1600"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatewb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1600"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}