XML sitemaps in Yoast SEO | Yoast SEO for WordPress
Hi! Search engines discover new
and updated content by following links. But sometimes, pages don't have
any internal links pointing to them, making them hard to find. And following links
is also not the fastest way for them to discover new or updated content. It's more efficient for search engines
to follow a map. Not just a map, an XML sitemap,
which we are seeing here. These sitemaps are specifically meant
for search engines. An XML sitemap is a list
of your website's most important pages. It also categorizes your website's content
into posts, pages, and all of the different types of content
you might have on your site. This categorization helps search engines
understand the structure of your website. These categories all have
their own separate sitemap. If we click the post sitemap, for example, we'll see a list of all the blog posts
published on yoast.com.
For every post, it shows the date
when it was last modified. This helps with SEO because you want
Google to crawl your updated content as soon as possible. In short, XML sitemaps give search engines
an overview of your content, they can provide back up
in case of bad internal linking, they can assist with crawling, and they give important additional
information to search engines, like when the content was last updated
and how it all ties together. But how do you create an XML sitemap? Well, because of their SEO value, we've added the ability to create your
own XML sitemaps in our Yoast SEO plugin. This functionality is available for both
the free and premium versions of Yoast SEO. If you have Yoast SEO installed, the plugin creates an XML sitemap
for your site automatically. If we go to the Yoast SEO settings
and then to Features, we see this toggle here, which is automatically switched to on.
You can access your own XML sitemap
by clicking the question mark and then this link
that says 'See the XML sitemap'. Yoast SEO also lets you determine
what exactly goes into the sitemap. To do this, go to the Search Appearance
settings, and click Content Types. Here, you see separate settings
for any type of content you have. If you switch the toggle
for 'Show X in the search results' to no, this type of content
won't be included in the sitemap. What's more, Yoast SEO splits up
large XML sitemaps to keep them fast, and you can add your sitemap
to Search Console and other webmaster tools. This will help search engines
find your sitemap fast and allows you to check for sitemap errors.
To sum up, a good XML sitemap
is like a roadmap of your website that leads search engines
to all your important pages, and this can really help with your SEO. No need to create one yourself, because Yoast SEO automatically creates
XML sitemaps for your website..
