Knowledgebase

Sitemaps are list of pages on your website accessible to visitors or search engines. Sitemaps are very important for Search Engine Optimization and this had been the most popular use to which sitemaps had been put. It provides search engines a file that can be quickly scanned to find the pages of your site. This means that all of your pages have a better chance of being indexed. While there are different ways to make a Sitemap, the fastest is using a free online tool.

There are various websites online that offer a free Sitemap generator. For this example we will use Sitemap Generator for generating an XML Sitemap. After navigating to the website, fill in your website information and click Start:

You wull also want to read:

Common Mistakes That Affect Website Performance and Search Engine Ranking

Designing a Website Like a Search Engine Crawler

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Google Webmaster Tools Introduction

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SEO Ranking and Website Speed

While it's working it will show your website being scanned:

Once it is complete, you will have an .xml file that you can upload to your site:

Remember that the file will not be linked on your actual website. This Sitemap is just for search engines crawling your website. The search engine will crawl the .xml file and use it to help them index your site.

Once you have downloaded the .xml file, you will want to upload it into your document root. This will be your public_html folder if the Sitemap is for your primary domain. If it's for an Addon Domain, place it in the document root for that Addon domain (usually a folder under public_html with the same name as the Addon domain). To upload your Sitemap, access your cPanel File Manager or use an FTP client.

Once your Sitemap is uploaded, there are a couple of optional steps you can take to help speed up the process of seach engines finding your Sitemap. While these steps are not required, they may help speed up the process of search engines finding it.

Using your Google Webmaster Tools account you can submit your Sitemap to Google for indexing.

You can also add the following line to your robots.txt file (be sure to replace yourdomain.com with your actual domain name):

sitemap: http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml

If you make major changes to your site, you will want to generate a new sitemap. Simply repeat the steps outlined above. There are also some sitemap generators which will not require that you generate a new sitemap.

You wull also want to read:

Common Mistakes That Affect Website Performance and Search Engine Ranking

Designing a Website Like a Search Engine Crawler

Essential Tips For Good Website Designing

Google Webmaster Tools Introduction

Improve Your SEO in Four Simple Ways

SEO Ranking and Website Speedread: How to Decrease Page Load Time

Sitemap Automation with Content Management Systems


Joomla Sitemap

You can create a Joomla sitemap by following these steps:

Step 1: Go to the Sitemaps section on Joomla.org.
Step 2: Download one of these components: Joomap, XMap or SEF Service Map. They are all good solutions and will serve your needs perfectly. They also generate both a ml sitemap and an html sitemap. Our steps on how to create a sitemap provide here will focus on the XMap sitemap generator.

Step 3: In your admininstrator area, go to Extensions >> Install / Uninstall and install Xmap via Joomla's installer.

Step 4: Go to Components >> XMap. You should see a page with three tabs "Sitemaps", "CSS" and "Extensions"

Step 5: Click "Add Menus" and select all the menus that you want search engines to find. Private menus shouldn't be included.
Step 6: Click the "Options" tab in the top-right, then click "Preferences". A pop-up will appear.
Step 7: You'll see a variety of different options for your sitemap. We recommend the following: "Include link to author: No" and also "Use Cache: Yes. Click Save.

Helping Search Engines to Find Your Sitemap

Step 8: From the XMap popup, take the URL from the "XML Sitemap" field. Copy and paste or save it into a text editor.
Step 9: Login to your Google Webmaster Tools account: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
Step 10: Click "Sitemaps" and enter the URL for your XML Sitemap. It might take several hours or evey days for Google to pick up this sitemap.
Step 11: Go to https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit and submit the same XML version of your sitemap.
Step 11: Go back to the administrator area of your Joomla site.
Step 12: Go to Menus and find the menu that appears at the bottom of your Joomla template. Often this will be the"Footer menu" position and contains your copyright information, privacy policy etc.
Step 13: Click "New" and choose "XMap" and save. This will create a link to the HTML version of your sitemap.

You wull also want to read:

Common Mistakes That Affect Website Performance and Search Engine Ranking

Designing a Website Like a Search Engine Crawler

Essential Tips For Good Website Designing

Google Webmaster Tools Introduction

Improve Your SEO in Four Simple Ways

SEO Ranking and Website Speed


WordPress Sitemap

How to create a Sitemap in WordPress?

There are several ways to create an XML sitemap in WordPress. One of the most popular solutions is Yoast’s WordPress SEO plugin which is a handly plugin to generate sitemaps. This plugin allows you to optimize blog posts along with offering other features such as sitemaps, social integration, and more. This plugin also works more efficnelty than other standalone sitemap generators for WordPress. It also offers custom sitemaps like the Video Sitemap.

To add this sitemap, and any other WordPress sitemap generator to your WordPress site, first thing you need to do is install and activate WordPress SEO plugin. In this case, we are focusing on the Yoast plugin. By default, WordPress SEO does not enable XML sitemap functionality, so you will have to turn it on. To do that go to SEO » XML Sitemaps and check the box to enable XML sitemap functionality.

When you check the box to enable XML sitemap functionality, WordPress SEO will show you a number of options that you can configure for your Sitemaps. If you are unsure about what to do with them, then ignore them and click on Save settings.

Now your sitemaps are generated and publicly accessible. WordPress SEO will show an XML Sitemap button which you can click to view your sitemap_index.xml sitemap.

You can also follow the steps outlined under how to submit your sitemap to Google above.

Drupal Sitemap


Drupal is another very popular CMS and we will now loo at how to install and enable a sitemap in Drupal.

Step 1: Begin by downloading the latest version of "XML Sitemap". Choose the top link under "Recommended releases".
Step 2: Extract the files into a folder on your desktop. You will not need to alter the name of the extracted file. It will be called "xmlsitemap"
Step 3: Login to your Drupal site's files via FTP and navigate to /sites/default/. If there isn't a folder called /modules/ here, then you will have to create one.
Step 4: Upload the "xmlsitemap" folder to /sites/default/modules/
Step 5: Go to Administer >> Modules >> Administration menu and check the box next to "XML sitemap" and click "Save Configuration".
Step 6: After saving you'll be presented with more options. We recommend that you will check all the boxes.

Now, you need to submit the Sitemap to Search Engines.

Step 7: Go to Administer >> Site Configuration >> XML Sitemap and you'll have more options to choose from.
Step 8: Inside the screen on Step 7 you'll see that XML Sitemap allows you'll see a box entitled "Search engines". This will allow you to submit your sitemap to Google, Yahoo and Bing (plus some others, if you care). Here is where you can go to register and collect the data you'll need and you can proceed to make all the submissions:
Google

Bing

Magento Sitemap

Magento is an e-commerce platform and runs thousands of products in some cases. Here is how to add a sitemap to your Magento 2 website and submit it to search engines.

To create a sitemap in Magento 2, follow the below steps:

Step 1: Login to your Magento 2 admin panel.

Step 2: On the left sidebar, click on STORES.

Step 3: Inside Settings menu, select Configuration.

Step 4: On the left panel, expand Catalog menu. Then, click XML Sitemap to see more options.

Step 5: Expand the Categories Options section. You have to set Frequency to one of the options from the drop-down menu. We usually select the weekly option because we run updates on our website every week. You can also null out this function by picking Never. That will depend on how often you add new content but it is not recommended.

In the Priority field, enter a value from 0.0 to 1.0. Zero (0.0) has the lowest priority.

Step 6: Now expand the Products Options section and do the necessary changes in the Frequency and Priority settings as needed. To include the images in the sitemap, set Add Images into Sitemap to All from the drop-down menu.

Step 7: Expand the CMS Pages Options section and do the necessary changes in the Frequency and Priority settings.

Step 8: Expand the Generation Settings and set Enabled to Yes.

Set the specific Start Time on which you want the sitemap to be updated.

For the daily update, set Frequency to Daily.

Enter an email address in the Error Email Recipient field to receive notifications about the Sitemap update.

Select the sender from Error Email Sender drop-down menu.

Select the error email style and content in Error Email Template drop-down menu.

Step 9: Expand the Sitemap File Limits section. In the Maximum No of URLs per File box, enter the limit of URLs that can be included in the sitemap. By default, the max limit is 50,000. In the Maximum File Size box, enter the size limit in bytes that is allocated for the sitemap XML file. The default size is 10,485,760 bytes (or 10.48 MB).

Step 10: Expand the Search Engine Submission Settings section. If you are using a robots.txt file to provide instructions to search engines that crawl your site, then set Enable Submission to Robots.txt field to Yes.

Step 11: When you are done, click the Save Config button.

To view your sitemap and submit it to Google and other search engines, visit yourstore.com/sitemap.xml and you’ll see the XML sitemap for your Magento store. Follow the guide above to submit to Google, Bing and other search engine.