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What is a sitemap?
How do I create a sitemap?
How do I tell search engines where my sitemap is located?

What is a sitemap?

A sitemap is adigital document. It should be created in a file format that can be read by web browsers, such asXMLorHTML.

The sitemap shows ahierarchicallist of all (sub)pages of a website and their relationships and links to each other. The sitemap is a simple method of informing search engines which pages are available to the search enginecrawler. A correctly created sitemap therefore serves the purpose of search engine optimization. 

How do I create a sitemap?

There are three options for creating the sitemap:

1. Automatic generation via CMS

Many CMSs have a function for automatically generating sitemaps. These usually add newly created pages to the sitemap automatically.

2. Manual creation

In principle, sitemaps can also be created manually. To do this, an .xml file should be created that contains all links. It should be structured as follows.

Example of the structure of a sitemap in XML format:

<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
        xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
        xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9 http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd">

<url>
<loc>https://taismo.de/was-ist/</loc>
<lastmod>2021-05-19T19:39:19+00:00</lastmod>
<priority>0.85</priority>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
</url>
<url>
<loc>https://taismo.de/was-ist/sitemap/</loc>
<lastmod>2021-05-19T19:39:19+00:00</lastmod>
<priority>0.80</priority>
</url>
</urlset>

The following tags aremandatory:

  • urlset: Contains general information about the file and refers to the standard of the protocol used. "0.9" refers to the version here.
  • url: Primary tag for each entry.
  • loc: Address of the page. Must begin with the protocol (e.g., http or https).

The following information is optionaland serves as additional information:

  • lastmod: Date of the last change to the page.
  • changefreq: Expected frequency of content changes.
  • priority: Specifies the priority of the page for the crawler. Valid values are between 0.0 and 1.0.

3. Use a sitemap generator

There are numerous sitemap generators available on the Internet. These simply need to be filled with the links to all available subpages. The source code or even the finished .xml file is then output.

The finished sitemap should be stored in theroot directoryof the web server.

How do I tell search engines where my sitemap is located?

Add the following line to the robots.txt file:
Sitemap: Link to the sitemap

Example: 
Sitemap: https://taismo.de/sitemap_index.xml

The path to the sitemap for Google can also be stored directly inGoogle Search Console. The option can be found under:
Menu > Index > Sitemaps > Add new sitemaps