How to Create a Sitemap: Tools, Tips & Best Practices

A sitemap is a file containing information about the pages, videos, and other files on the site and also informs click-wise relationships. To put it plainly, it helps search engines crawl better. There are two basic types:

XML Sitemap - Search engines such as Google and Bing.
HTML Sitemap - Developed for human users to navigate more easily.

In the event that you don't know what a sitemap is good for, it is its purpose: to ensure that even those pages not well-linked to any other pages of your site are found and indexed by search engines.

Importance of Sitemaps:

The bigger and more dynamic your site gets, the harder it will be to ensure that some important page is crawling and being perceived clearly by the search-engines. Thus, the role of a sitemap is so crucial: a sitemap isn’t just a technical obligation, it’s an asset strategically. Because it can bring:

More consistent indexing: Absence of a sitemap, some pages, especially those lying deep somewhere in your site, may be completely ignored by the crawlers from the search engines. Sitemap indirectly provides a list from which crawlers can choose to access all critical URLs to minimize the chances of anything valuable remaining unnoticed.
Support for multimedia and alternate content: If any cutting-edge features provide video, image, or multilingual page support, sitemaps would explain to search engines how this content fits into the broader site structure. An XML sitemap properly marked up can actually be made use of to enhance visibility for multimedia-rich or translated content that would otherwise likely be ignored.
Better planning and structure: The exercise of creating a sitemap, whether XML or HTML, forces one to work through the organization of one's site. It assists in revealing the redundant complexity or voids in navigation and simplifying the content and facilitating the user flow becomes simpler.

Therefore a sitemap must not be considered as an instrument of measurement of technicality; it is so much more than that. It makes your content future-proof and understandable and makes your site discoverable, as your site grows.

What are the Sitemaps types?

Typically, we get two sitemaps, and they are the XML and the HTML sitemaps.

XML Sitemap: This notifies the search engines about the important pages of a site.

These are generated using a sitemap generator so that search engines can easily crawl and index the important pages.

HTML Sitemaps: These sitemaps are for human end-users and list important pages to assist in navigation.

Other types may include video mocks, image mocks, news mocks, and mobile mocks- specifically XML sitemaps catered toward indexing rich media and time-sensitive or mobile-specific content.

Tools to Create Sitemaps:

XML-Sitemaps.com Sitemap Generator: Web-based application used to generate XML sitemaps.
Yoast SEO: This is another popular WordPress plug-in with embedded XML sitemap generators.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider: This is a desktop software that generates elaborate models of sitemaps as well as audits the structure of a site.
Google Search Console: It offers options for submitting XML sitemaps as well as tracking performance.
Sitemap Checker tools: Verify the accuracy of your sitemap and detect any errors present.
SEMrush and Ahrefs: Feature-rich SEO suites that also have capabilities on map creation and analysis.

Best practices for Sitemaps:

Prepare an XML sitemap with the help of either Yoast SEO plugin or XML-Sitemaps.com site.
The next thing to remember is to update your sitemap too whenever you make changes to the content of your site.
Submit your XML sitemap next to Google Search Console in order to accelerate the indexing.
A sitemap checker is a tool that will take your sitemap by an error test.
Your sitemap should not contain blocked pages (through robots.txt or noindex).
For user navigation, implement an HTML sitemap.
The Sitemap Example should be referred to for compliance to its structure.

Conclusion

Sitemaps are extremely important; you learned that as what an XML sitemap is, how to build one using a sitemap generator, and maintain it using a sitemap checker. And don't forget to create HTML sitemaps for your users and check against a sitemap example from time to time. Improving knowledge of what a sitemap is and using tools like a sitemap generator, sitemap checker, and a proper sitemap example will well equip one for better SEO, more inflow of traffic, and an improved user experience.