Surely you have heard about sitemaps and their importance for SEO, but no one has ever explained to you in a simple way what it is and what it is for.
A sitemap is a file where all the pages or urls that your website has are found. Its function is to indicate to search engine spiders which pages exist within a web, so that these spiders, also known as bots, can access all the content of a web.
In addition to pages as such, there can be different types of sitemap (products, videos, images).
“Sitemaps are files that provide information about the pages, videos, and other files on a website, as well as the relationships between them.”
Why are sitemaps used?
Sitemaps are used to help Google reach all parts of the web, including those URLs that do not have good internal linking or have an excessive level of depth.
Although it is not mandatory to have a sitemap, they are very useful when we have a very high number of urls. The bigger the web, the more chances there are that it will be left uncrawled pagesand if you don’t crawl and index them, they won’t show up in search results.
If for some reason not all urls are accessible, with the sitemap we make sure that you “take” them into account, since Including a URL in a sitemap does not guarantee that Google will safely crawl it.
On the other hand, on small websites with correct internal linking, it would not be necessary to use a sitemap, but as we will see later, Google itself, through Search Console, does not provide very interesting data about the status of our urls through the sitemap.
Example of using a sitemap for a website with many urls.
If you review the sitemap of PCcomponentes, you can see how they use an index of sitemaps which they divide into category sitemaps, product sitemaps and brand sitemaps.
One of the main advantages of sitemaps is that Google itself allows you to indicate in the search console where the sitemap is locatedand will offer us information about the number of urls it discovers in each sitemap and the number of urls it indexesalso informing us of any possible errors.
For example, on the website we use the Yoast SEO plugin to generate different sitemaps.
Thanks to the use of the sitemap, it is possible to check the status of all the urls that belong to it in Google Search Console. For example, for our post sitemap we can check that there are no errors or warnings, and that all urls are valid.
In addition to the above, it is also especially useful to know how much content we have in each part of the web without the need to enter the cms or consult a history of publications.
Different ways to create a sitemap
Once we have explained what a sitemap is and why it is used, we will see how to create a sitemap in different cms.
➡️Sitemap for WordPress.
The simplest thing is to use any plugin that automatically manages the creation and updating of the sitemap. Plugins like or are among the most used.
➡️Sitemap for Prestashop.
In Prestashop it is a bit more complicated since by default some version of Prestashop does not have a module to work with sitemaps.
In version 1.6 comes by default the module google-sitemap, while in 1.7 you won’t have to install it manually. It is very important to have a well-configured sitemap, especially in online stores where there can be a very wide catalog of products and an inventory rotation that causes many variations in the number of products and categories, which ends up generating new urls that must be crawled by search engines.
Other options to consider are payment moduleswhich have more features than the module we mentioned earlier. The most used and the ones that offer the best functionality are the following:
➡️Sitemap for Joomla.
As with other cms, the easiest thing is to use plugins. In the case of Joomla, we have different extensions that will allow us to automatically manage our site map. Among the most recommended we have the following:
- JS Sitemap: Payment extension that has been the most used for this cms. Highly recommended if you have a large website that is constantly updated.
- JL Sitemap: Free extension with less functionality than the previous one. Available in the
➡️Manual sitemap for any website
In addition to plugins, modules and extensions, there is always the option of using different tools to create sitemaps manually.
Screaming Frog.
Thanks to this tool you can generate a site map that meets the standards of Google and other search engines. It is not a complex process and there is one (in English).
Basically what needs to be done, once the web has been completely crawled, we can ask the tool to generate an xml file in which we can indicate which url to include and how important we should give each one.
You can see an example of this type of sitemap created with Screaming Frog in its own file:
We also recommend you visit to get the full potential of this tool
XML Sitemaps.
Another option that combines a free version (up to 500 urls) with a paid version. The process is similar, the tool analyzes the entire web and configures a valid file as a sitemap with our urls.
In the following image you can see a screenshot of how this tool works
Has it become clear to you what a sitemap is and how it can help you improve your SEO strategy? If you have any questions, you can contact us 🙂
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