Ultimate Sitemap Guide for Beginners (Step by Step)

Key Takeaways

let me ask you a question would you plan a wedding without telling your guests where the venue is or would you go on a treasure hunt without a map i'm pretty sure the answer is no so building a wordpress website without a site map as you know yup this is a video for wordpress users if you're not a wordpress user you may need to do something like this on your own or spend money on all these tools so we highly recommend that you get into wordpress and use rankmath because firstly it is free and secondly it is hassle free two frees in a row all right just to clarify search engines like google don't actually require you to have a sitemap because at this day and age they are smart enough to crawl most of the urls on your website but it is highly encouraged for every website to have one because they're just some parts of your website that may be hard for search engines to reach but with a sitemap it becomes easier okay what's a site map you may ask there are two types of sitemaps one is for your site visitors called html sitemaps it is basically a page that lists all the links on your website if your site navigation is poorly linked a html sitemap may help but if your site navigation is well structured there is no point in having a html sitemap because it has little to no positive impact on seo so we'll not be talking about this sitemap but we'll be talking about the other site map that is meant for search engines it is essentially a document that lists all the urls of your pages posts videos images products etc of your website that you want search engines to crawl and index now though having a sitemap for search engines is good a poorly optimized sitemap might negatively affect your website so in this video we're talking about the best practices the benefits and i'll walk you through step by step on how to set up a sitemap on a new website with rankmath and i'll show you how to submit the sitemap to google halfway through the video you'll understand how rankmath has made everything easy efficient and effective for you as a site owner so let's go [Music] hey is jack here from rankmath the wordpress seo plugin that gives your business the best chance of beating your competitors on search engines we put out a lot of videos to help you grow your search traffic so consider subscribing to our channel to get seo and business knowledge delivered straight to your youtube notification all right before i walk you through how to set up and configure your sitemap it's always important to know the guidelines before we do anything this is the general sitemap guidelines by google if you want to go in detail on this document we have left a link in the description but let me just share with you the important points if your website has multiple versions like for example having a www you want to provide google with the exact url with the www do not miss that out the key is the exact url of the page you want google to crawl and also do not add tracking codes or ids on your url add your sitemap to the root folder of your website if you don't know where it is basically it's the main folder in the file manager of your website don't worry about this if you follow what i'll show you later on you don't even have to access your file manager and create the sitemap manually if your website has multiple languages you have to use this hreflang annotations if your website is super huge with lots of urls note that one sitemap can contain up to a maximum of 50 000 urls and it must not exit 50 megabytes also google recommends that you should use a sitemap index file to list all individual sitemaps for example if you have a post sitemap that lists all your posts urls and you have another product sitemap that lists all your products you should have a sitemap index file that consolidates all the individual sitemaps into one so you will only need to submit the sitemap index to google anyway let's continue we need to list only the kinetico urls which means if your website has duplicated pages such as service pages with different currencies and prices you will want to add a kinetico url on all the duplicated pages pointing to only one version of the page assuming this is the main currency you are dealing in so only this url should be entered into the sitemap you don't want to add the rest of the urls the key here is it takes resources for google and other search engines to crawl your pages and they dislike duplicated content because it weighs their crawl budget and the more duplicated content you feed to the web crawlers the more they will overlook the content you actually want them to crawl so please only add the urls you want google to crawl in your sitemap if you have other media types you want google to crawl and index for example you want your images to appear on the image tab of google or you want your videos to appear on the videos tab of google then you want to use the sitemap extensions which we have for you in rankmath and finally since google ignores the priority and change frequency values on the sitemap which many popular seo plugins use and considers only the last mod value in rank math we follow very closely with the guidelines by excluding those unnecessary values making it efficient for any wordpress sites so that's what you need to know about the guidelines now let's talk about the benefits and why you should have a sitemap for your website the main benefit especially for new websites is to improve the search visibility of your website if your website has little to no backlinks google and other search engines may not even know that your website exists it will probably take them a long time to discover the contents of your site so submitting your sitemap is the first thing that every website should do to let search engines know of your site's existence it makes total sense there are millions of new websites and pages surfacing the internet every day so if you don't even take the step to notify search engines how would they know if your site exists right the second benefit is especially helpful for sites that are constantly updating for example affiliate sites or e-commerce sites because sitemaps notify search engines and let them know when the last modified version of this url is and they will crawl the page accordingly and finally if your website has a lot of often pages which you shouldn't have it means pages on your website that were not linked from other pages on your site having a sitemap will allow search engines to discover those pages so now that we know the benefits of a sitemap don't you think sitemap is a must-have for all new websites anyway let's talk about how you can create a sitemap easily with rankmath the first thing you got to do on your wordpress dashboard is to go to plugins and install plugins you want to ensure that the rank math plugin is installed and activated once you have done that you'll be asked to connect your rankmath account if you have an existing account you can connect it otherwise you can register a new account here once you have connected and activated your account you'll be led to the setup wizard in case you don't see this page you want to go back to rankmaps dashboard and click on the setup wizard it will lead you back to the same page now we highly recommend that you select the advanced mode because you will access many more modules than if you have chosen the easy mode let's continue with the setup you can go through the setup wizard at your pace but we highly recommend connecting rankmath with the google account you wish to manage your google search console and analytics because it makes the whole process seamless i'll show you what i mean let's say that i connect rankmath to this google account it will ask you for permission to access all these information and it is important that you check all these now although we have access to your data we don't store it on our server the permission is for us to access the data and store it directly on your site's database so you don't have to worry about us getting hold of your data this is for us to execute our duties properly once you have connected your site to your google account you will realize your site is already verified with search console so you don't have to verify it manually and then here's what you need to do keep this toggled on and make sure that all the assets you wish to be included in your sitemap to be indexed by google are toggled on don't worry about the news and video sitemaps we'll talk about them later and as you click on save and continue go through the wizard and as you are back on the dashboard go to sitemap settings and you will see your sitemap index page here that's how simple it is to create a site map on rank math click on this link and do you remember one of google's guideline is to have a sitemap index to consolidate all individual sitemaps this is the sitemap index and these are the links to the individual sitemaps that will contain all the urls of each post type you wish google to index any links that are marked with a kinetico url or a no index meta tag would not be included in the sitemaps another best practice if you remember we made following the best practices super easy but how do you add a canonical url for example we have these urls on the post sitemap i made this obvious this is the duplicated page and this is the page that google needs to crawl so this page shouldn't be on the site map let me copy the main page url and let's visit the duplicator page over on the blog editor let's click on rank math at the top right and select advanced which is the second icon from the left under the kinetico url you want to paste in the page you want google to crawl and if you update this page head back to your sitemap and if you refresh this page the duplicated page url will be gone as you can see here simple and easy everything is streamlined for you now let me walk you through how to submit your sitemap to search engines before talking about the sitemap configurations in fact you don't even need to submit your sitemap manually if you are using rank math i'll show you what i mean to submit your sitemap to google you need to access the google search console with the account you have connected with rankmath if you don't know how to access this page just do a google search on this if not we have left a link in the description now to start let's click on start now make sure that this is the google account you have used earlier to connect with rankmath then on the top left you will see your website verified on google search console to submit a sitemap click on sitemaps if you are using rankmath you will see that we have automatically submitted a sitemap for you so you don't have to actually do anything but remember we have removed one url when we have added the kinetico tag so in total we should have one less than this so let's submit our sitemap manually let's go to the sitemap settings of our site let's copy the sitemap index link and back to google search console we want to paste the link here and make sure that we only keep the urls locked and hit submit it is just that simple now it may be insignificant to configure the sitemap settings when your site is new and there are so many settings on rankmath that could confuse you i highly recommend that you watch this through so you know what exactly these settings are so when your site gets bigger you will know how to manage your sitemaps the first thing we're going to talk about is the links per sitemap this is the maximum number of urls that will be listed on each sitemap google's guideline is to be not more than 50 000 urls but it is very seldom that a website will have that many links this number was a thousand in our previous default setting but we find that google responds better to a smaller sitemap so we have reduced the default value to 200 and that's our recommended setting as for the images and sitemaps you know if you want your images on your posts and pages to appear on the image tab of google you want to keep this turned on and with search results now having visual assets displayed it makes total sense to get your visual assets indexed the same thing here depending on how you design your posts and pages your featured image may not be displayed and may not be included in the sitemap so you want to turn this on to add your featured images in your sitemap now this is for ranked map pro users only if you have installed a plugin called advanced custom fields to for example create a page template and you want those dynamic assets used on different pages and posts to be added in the sitemap then you want to go to the rank rankmaps dashboard and toggle this acf module on and as you head back to the sitemap settings you will see this include images from the acf fuse this is a useful feature as more wordpress web designers are using custom fields for post and page design templates now for some reason you want a particular page post or custom post type to be excluded from your sitemap you can paste the post id here every wordpress page will have a unique id just go to your list of posts click on edit and on the url you will see something like post equals the post number and in this case this is post number one which is the post id of this page so on your site map setting under this exclude post if you want to exclude post number one just put the post id here now before i hit save changes take note that this is post number one as i save changes and i refresh the site map that page is gone from the post site map the same goes for the taxonomies which are the categories and tags similarly if you visit the list of category pages click on edit and you will see the category and tag id equals one this is the unique id of this category and that is the exact number you want to add to exclude a particular category page from the site map so for example on the sitemap index let's go to the category sitemap this is the category page we want to exclude from the sitemap and remember this is just for an example as i save changes and i refresh the category sitemap page you will see the category url gone next if you don't want to manually submit a sitemap every time there are changes and you want rankmath to automatically do that for you then keep this turned on so we will ping search engines or nudge the search engines whenever there are changes to your site map we have your best interest at heart let's head up now for most sites you won't need to bother about the author's sitemaps especially if you only have one author on your site but if you have multiple authors like a new site where people are looking for articles explicitly written by an author then it would make sense to have an author sitemap you won't see this here by default because under the titles and matter and under authors by default the author robots meta is set to no index but if it is set to index you will see the author's sitemap settings here you can control which alter to appear on the sitemap by excluding user rows and if there is a particular order you do not want to add to the site map you can go to all users and select the user you want to exclude by clicking on edit and right at the top on the url you will see user id equals 3 3 is the number you want to add back at your site map setting over here and hit save changes this is very useful as your site grows and the number of orders increases now let's talk about the sitemap settings for each post type for posts you will see your individual sitemap link here and this is basically a part of the sitemap index as i've shown you it makes total sense to keep this setting on so that any new updated or deleted posts will be reflected on the site map if you toggle this off what is the point of having a sitemap in the first place right then the image custom fields again this is for pro users only if you have toggled the include images from the acf fuse on then you don't actually need to add those fields from acf here but if you use custom fields from wordpress or other plugins then you will want to add the field name of the custom field here and the image will be added to the account here that's all you need to know about the post site map the same applies to the sitemap for pages so i don't need to explain much now for attachments by default on wordpress every image and media on your website will have an individual page like this and because it is not recommended for these attachment pages to be indexed due to thin content which could negatively impact your website's seo we have added this redirect attachments feature so all the media attachment pages will be redirected to the post they appear in and will not have its own page in this case the image has not been used on any pages of the website so it will be redirected to the home page instead our recommendation for this include in sitemap for attachment pages is to keep it off but if for some reason you need to turn this on if you click on the toggle button nothing will happen and it is because of the setting i've mentioned you need to go to general settings and under links you can toggle this off and save changes you need to go to titles and meta as well under attachments you want to toggle the media robots meta to index so that all the media attachment urls will be added to the sitemap when it is available anything set to no index will not be included in the sitemap let's save changes and as you head back to the site map settings and select attachments you can toggle this on so that the individual media attachment page urls will be added to the attachment site map as you can see here but this is not our recommended setting we highly recommend that you turn this back on anyway back to the sitemap settings now let's talk about the sitemap settings for forums depending on what forum plugin you use it will create additional post types as you can see i've added the bb press plugin and that's why you see these three post types together with the topic text if you install other plugins like discussion boards it will only create a topic post types by default so it really depends on the plugin you use rankmath will detect any post types added by other plugins and it will create an individual sitemap link to each of the post types with the same settings accordingly as you can see anyway if you run a forum it would make sense that you want google to index the forum pages the topics within the forum and the replies within the topics for example if this is a support forum of your brand you definitely want your users to be able to find your support forum questions and answers on search engines it helps with your customer service it increases your brand value which inherently improves seo so it makes sense that you want to add the forum the topics and the replies to the sitemap i won't talk about the image custom fields as they are the same as what i've discussed in other post types let's go to products if you have installed woocommerce on your site you will see this post type in a sitemap setting it just makes sense for your products to be added to your sitemap because you want your products to be indexed on search engines and then if you have added a quiz plugin like in this case i've added a plugin called wp quiz pro it will add a new post type here it really depends on the plugin you use that determines if the post type will appear here so if you have created quiz landing pages that target very important keywords that will drive leads and sales to your business you definitely want to include your quizzes into the sitemap for indexing as those pages will drive organic traffic that will eventually convert into business for you now for taxonomies it is not that straightforward generally for post categories and tags we recommend to index categories and add them to the sitemap and no index for text so the urls of the tag pages would not be added in the sitemap but it really depends on you let me give you an example for categories and then i'll talk about the text later let's say that you run a movie review website and you have a category with the name best movie of the year this is like the featured category you have created this category at the start of your website this category will include all the individual movie reviews and whenever you find a good movie you will add that movie review to this category then after a couple of years you have decided okay i'll write an article targeting the keyword best movie of the year that should drive more traffic to my website right so now you have two pages trying to rank for the same keyword this usually happens by accident so since there is this conflicting interest the question to ask is which page do you value more if it is ranked on search engines most likely the category page is already ranked so should you upgrade your category page for more user actions or will it be better if your post article gets ranked instead if it is the letter then you want to know index the category page as for tags the reason why we recommend no indexing is because of tin content and duplicate content categories allow for hierarchy and it should be well thought out for good site navigation while tags do not have hierarchy in most cases you can create text without much taught and it will probably have one or two posts in a tag archive and even if there are more items most likely they will contain similar posts across different tech archives google will most probably flag those tech archive pages for tin content or duplicated content so in general sense we will not add them to the site map so for category pages we want to include them in the sitemap but if the category has no post added to them you do not want to add them to the sitemap because of tin content keep this setting off unless you know what you are doing i'll quickly run through the rest for text keep this off because we don't want them to be indexed now for topic tags this is created by the forum plugin i've added it consolidates all the topic tags you have created that allows you to sort topics in the topic tag archive and again the key here is does it add value to your site visitors if yes you will want to add it to your sitemap for indexing and obviously you want to exclude empty tags now for products it is a little different some product owners prefer to use tags to organize their products based on different attributes instead of using product categories so in that case it makes sense to add the urls of the product tag archives in the sitemap for indexing so whichever taxonomy you prefer to organize and sort your products and you think it adds value to your site visitors you want to index that taxonomy i'll leave this to you to decide we do not want to touch this include empty terms in any of the taxonomies unless you know what you are doing now let's talk about the special sitemaps that we have prepared for you all these are meant for pro users so let's start with the new sitemap if you are a pro user and you don't see this then you want to go to the rankmaps dashboard scroll down a little and you will see this new sitemap module you want to toggle this on once you've done that on your sitemap settings you will see the new sitemap here the benefit for having this new sitemap is for your articles to get a place on the google news i'm not sure if you have used google news before sometimes you'll get a notification on the latest news of your interests on your phone on your tablet or whichever device you use and what's awesome about google news is the news feeds are personalized so if your content is aligned with someone else's interest they may be notified your articles do not necessarily need to be news like those from bbc nbc cna or whatever also if somebody searches a keyword on google and they click on the news tab they may see your article as well so with the help of a new sitemap it may drive traffic to your website but there are some rules for example you should include urls for articles that were published in the last two days and you need to remove them thereafter in rankmath's new sitemap we do that automatically for you you can add up to 1000 urls in a sitemap and if there are more than 1000 urls in a sitemap you need to break them up into multiple sitemaps it's nothing new here and don't list more than 50 000 urls in a single sitemap file again nothing new here it will also show you the required sitemap format if you want to get into the details of this page you can visit this link i've left it in the description as well but if you use ranked maps new sitemap and you follow along this video you never have to worry about following the guidelines because we made it seamless for you anyway to start we have the new sitemap link here all the articles that qualify as news based on the setting below will be included here you see all this listed on the new site map are article from the post that is created through here if you select products then all the products you have created recently will be added to the new sitemap so as long as there is a new article or whatever is published under the selected post type will be added to the new sitemap anyway we recommend selecting only the post types that make sense to be added to the new sitemap do not select everything now what if you don't want a particular article in the post type to be added in the new sitemap for example this what can you do we can visit the page go to the wordpress blog editor click on rank maps tab select advanced and right at the bottom you can choose to select no index so that this article will not be added to the new sitemap so as i update and i refresh the new sitemap that article will be gone now don't worry about this no index the no index doesn't apply to the entire article it is meant for the new sitemap only your article will still be indexed normally now back to the new sitemap we have the google news publication name which are these website names here we have the tag radar the straight times search engine journal so if your site name is for example jack's pets news you want to add the exact name here but in this case the name of this website is rank math tester i'll put the exact name here let's scroll further down and over here you can exclude article urls to be added to the new sitemap based on the categories and tags they are sorted under that's basically it in this case every new post article will be added to the new sitemap for two days and then it will automatically be removed and whatever best practices you need to adhere to are done in the background for you so you don't need to worry about a thing just write your content and let rankmath take care of everything for you now let's go to the video sitemap needless to say if you embed any videos on your article or product it makes sense to add the article or product url containing the video onto the video sitemap because it helps your article to show up on the video tab on google as you can see there is the video snippet and this is the page that contains the video if you click on the video it will not bring you anywhere other than the article that contains the video and you will find a video within the article so even if you do not have a youtube channel of your own for example and you embed videos from other channels to your article it can drive traffic to your article your article will have more visibility in this sense and if you have a youtube channel and you embed your own videos on your articles that's even better more exposure for both your article and your channel anyway this is the video sitemap link that contains all the urls with videos you can hide the video sitemap from normal users this setting is off by default and if you keep this off the site visitors will be able to see the list of urls with videos but if you turn this on if i log out from the website and i refresh this page they will see a 404 instead we're back on the video sitemap you can choose which post types that contains video to be added to the video site map choose only the ones that make sense to you and finally if you have added or embedded videos using custom fields you will want to add the few names of the custom fields here one per line as it states just one more thing to add which is out of the video sitemap settings on the video sitemap you can see that there is no video thumbnail on the embedded video you do not necessarily need to add one manually ranked map has a way to auto generate a video thumbnail if you go to titles and mentor and if you select either one of these post types other than the attachments you will see this auto generate image setting now since the video is embedded on a post let's go to post and if we toggle this on and save changes all newly embedded videos on post articles will have a video thumbnail auto generated and for this case since the video is already embedded before we turn the setting on there is one more step to go go to status and tools under the database tools as you scroll down you will see this option to generate video schema for all posts and pages click on generate and ok as we head back to the video site map and hit refresh we will see the thumbnail automatically added to it that's all you need to know about the video sitemap now let's talk about the local sitemap now if you are a pro user and you have activated the local seo and knowledge graph module you will see the local site map here this tab allows you to include a kml file to your local sitemap but what's a kml file right kml means keyhole markup language and it is a file format used for storing geographical locations google uses this kml file to verify your business listing and location so that the exact location of your business will appear on applications like google maps and google earth your kml file will include the name of your business the address the phone number and the geo coordinates of your business so to add those information you need to go to the titles and meta of rank math and under local seo i'm pretty sure your business is going to be an organization as you scroll down you will see the name of your business the address you want to add your business address here the phone number for your customer service or whatever you choose here and you want to add the phone number here and finally the joe coordinates as i've added here if you want to know how to find your business location's joe coordinates you can visit this link we have left this link in the description as well if you are a business owner we highly recommend that you go through this written tutorial to help you better understand how our local seo module will work for your business anyway we have added our joe coordinates and now back to the local sitemap settings we have toggled this on and as we click on the locations kml file we will see the location of our business here with the address phone number and the joe coordinates so many settings but i hope it is simple and easy for you to understand what each setting does and how it affects your website up to this point if this video helped please do us a little favor and smash that thumbs up button we really appreciate that that's all the sitemap configurations we have for you now let's talk about some common sitemap issues you may encounter so we have a list of sitemap issues that we have covered in detail in this link i'll leave it in the description as well in case you don't find your issue in this video you may want to visit this page but right now let me cover the most common issues if your sitemap link is showing a 404 error here's what you need to do step one is to flush your permalinks sounds complicated but it is very easy on your wordpress dashboard go to settings and permalinks even if you have not made any changes scroll to the bottom and hit save changes and the permalinks will be flushed step 2 is to flush the sitemap settings you want to go to rank math and sitemap settings and with this links per site map if this is 200 or whatever number you want to change this number to something else for example 201 or whatever number as long as it is not the same don't worry about this you can change this number back to normal later on and then let's save changes and your sitemap settings will be flushed step number three is to exclude the sitemap from caching if you don't know what caching is it is basically a separate version of your website stored on your web server so that your site can be delivered faster it is like pre-making food so that it can be served much faster the same concept applies to your site you don't have to make an order whenever there is a request for your site otherwise your web server will be very busy so in this sense your sitemap might not be cached with the previous version of your website and that's why your site is showing a 404 page so you will want to exclude your sitemap from caching because it should stay up to date with your changes otherwise it defeats the purpose of having a sitemap if you want to know how to exclude the sitemap from the caching plugins you use then you want to check this page out i'm pretty sure we have documented the steps for all the caching plugins but if your caching plugin is not in the page do let us know in the comments now you should see your sitemap already but if you still can't access it the final step is to check with your web host to see if any security plugins are causing the issue if yes you might want to ask them to exclude the sitemap from the firewall and rerun the test again i'm pretty sure by then your site map will be accessible now if the sitemap index page shows a blank page like this we recommend that you replace the url slug with a question mark sitemap equals one and hit enter if the sitemap loads it means rank math is able to successfully generate the sitemap of your website but for some reason it is unable to rewrite the generated sitemap to the sitemapindex.xml page so to solve this problem if you are using an nginx web server you need to add this set of code to your nginx config file to fix the issue you can find this code on this url the link is in the description as well but if your website is on an apache server then you will need to add this different set of code to the htaccess file of your website which you can find on the general settings of rank math and over added edit.htxs after you have added the codes you'll want to do the same steps i've mentioned earlier flush the permalinks flush the sitemap settings and exclude the sitemap from caching that's it that's all you need to know about sitemaps and i hope you are now one step closer to becoming an seo expert to explore your site traffic if this video helped don't forget to smash that thumbs up button thank you appreciate it if you have any other questions feel free to leave a comment down below we'll do our best to help you out do subscribe and hit the bell notification to get seo and business knowledge delivered straight to your youtube notification this is jack from rankmath i'll see you in the next video you