A Simple Guide To Creating WordPress XML Sitemap

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BEST WORDPRESS WEBSITE DEVELOPMENT COMPNAY San
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A Simple Guide To Creating WordPress XML Sitemap
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Are you a blogger or webmaster who regularly
updates his website with great content? However,
have you ever wondered whether all that material
is being discovered by your audience and search
engines or not? This is where sitemaps turn out
to be useful. They provide a complete list of all
the pages of your interface to visitors and
search engines. Here we are discussing the way
for creating WordPress XML sitemap. Lets dive
into the topic to know more about these documents.
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Background
In the beginning, sitemaps were used as a
navigation aid since web design had not evolved
to offer convenient navigation links to users.
However, these documents are still important when
we have versatile ways of displaying navigation
links. There are two kinds of sitemaps namely,
HTML and XML. The former is a separate page on a
website that tells human visitors the location of
various pages. The inclusion of this sitemap
makes your interface more user-friendly. An XML
sitemap is primarily meant for search engines. It
contains URLs of all the relevant pages apart
from some metadata. In this tutorial, we are
focusing only on the XML sitemap.
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What Is An XML Sitemap?
As mentioned before, an XML sitemap is a
collection of all the URLs of different pages of
a website that are accessible to all the users.
It provides a map to search engines that they can
refer to for crawling all your pages. You can use
sitemaps to convey to search engines which pages
are more important than others. The document also
helps search engines know how often an interface
is updated. A sitemap looks like the one shown in
the image below.
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Why Are XML Sitemaps Needed?
Whether you have converted website to WordPress
or built a new one, you need XML Sitemaps as they
are vital for improving your interfaces SEO.
They do not directly affect your interfaces SERP
rankings but they do improve its crawling. They
help search engine bots to crawl your pages
faster than they would have done in the absence
of the document. This means that all the fresh
content of your interface also gets indexed
quickly. You can also add metadata to prioritize
the crawling of specific pages of your interface.
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How To Create An XML Sitemap In WordPress?
1. Install the Yoast SEO Plugin You do not need
to write any code for generating your sitemap and
the process can be done easily by using a plugin.
There are various SEO plugins that website owners
can use to improve the online visibility of their
interfaces. Arguably the most popular product in
this domain is the Yoast SEO plugin.
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2. Enable The Advanced Settings Pages Feature
A new option named SEO along with the Yoast logo
will be added to the dashboard menu. Click on it
and then press the Features tab. Scroll down the
screen until you reach the Advanced settings
pages option. Turn the option to Enabled and save
your changes.
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3. See Your XML Sitemap
Go back to the menu panel on the left-hand side.
Here you will now see a new option called XML
Sitemaps under SEO. Click on it to open its
settings screen. You can switch between the
various tabs to select post types or taxonomies
that should be included in the sitemap. You can
also choose to exclude a sitemap of your authors.
In the General tab, under the Your XML Sitemap
section, you will find a link to view your
sitemap. Click on it to check out your document.
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How To Submit An XML Sitemap To Google?
Creating the sitemap is just half the job and you
need to submit it to search engines to complete
the process. Here we are showing you how it can
be submitted to Google. 1. Add Your Website To
Google Search Console Account Google Search
Console is the search engine giant's free service
for webmasters which lets them monitor their
website. It is a handy tool for spotting crawling
and indexing issues. You can create your account
on the service by using an existing Google
profile. The detailed procedure to add WordPress
website to Google Search Console has been
explained in another post. You can follow the
instructions given there to create your account.
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2. Submit Your Sitemap
Once you have successfully added your website to
Google Search Console, go to Crawl in the menu on
the left-hand side. Click on the arrow icon to
expand its list of options and then choose
Sitemaps. Press the Add/ Test Sitemap button and
then enter the XML Sitemap URL that you got
through your Yoast SEO plugin in the previous
method. Hit Submit to complete the process. You
will have to wait for a few days for Google to
finish the processing and crawl your links.
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