How To Create A Sitemap For My Website

What is a Sitemap?

In technical terms a Sitemap is a link map of all the pages in your site. In layman's terms, a Sitemap is a page that lists all your pages of your website, that the user can click on to go to that page. A Sitemap helps make your website more user-friendly, which is what Google and other search engines look for.

Creating a sitemap for your visitors

The purpose of a Sitemap is primarily for your visitors. So if they cannot find a page via your main navigation menu, they can go to the sitemap and find the page they are looking for.

Creating a sitemap for the search engines

A Sitemap helps the search engines find pages in your site too, and may help index these pages. The search engines take into consideration how user-friendly your site is, hence why including a sitemap for your users is crucial.

Learn how to create a Sitemap

At Let's Build a Website, we can teach you how to create a Sitemap in our SEO consulting course. If you are interested in SEO or creating a Sitemap for your website. Click on the link to learn more about our SEO Training & Consulting.

Here are some quick and easy steps to create an XML Sitemap

Remember an XML sitemap is for the search engines.

Use these steps if you have a HTML website.
Go to a FREE online Sitemap creator – for e.g. https://www.xml-sitemaps.com/
Create and download the Sitemap and add it to your hosting server. See below for more info.
Then, notify Google and Bing about the new Sitemap.

Where do I add my sitemap?

If you have created your Sitemap manually, then you will have to:

Upload the Sitemap file to your server into the root folder of your site.
You can do this via CPanel or File Manager.
Check that sitemap is working by typing – www.yourdomainname.com/sitemap.xml into the browser.
This should display your sitemap.
Then add the Sitemap to your Google Console & Bing.

Add to the footer of your website

Once you have created the sitemap, you should add a link to the footer area of your website. The is the most obvious place for the user to look for a it.
All important pages like Sitemap, privacy, contact, terms, and conditions should always be included in your footer.