Sitemaps and YOU! - Blue Fish

Evelyn Riales

Jul 10, 2019

Google is a fantastic beast. For many it's this amazing tool that gives the little people a chance to be found through the power of the internet, and for others? It's a proverbial strict step parent that ALWAYS wants you to clean your room. But no matter how much you clean, it's never enough...

Anyway, let's talk about sitemaps and why they rock!

Jack, you silly fool, what on Earth is a sitemap?
You, probably

A sitemap is exactly what it says it is. It's a map that tells Google's robots all the locations on your website. It kinda looks like this:

[coolzone.website/sitemap.xml]
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<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://coolzone.website/</loc>
 <lastmod>2019-05-23T14:32:00+00:00</lastmod>
 <priority>1.00</priority>
</url>
<url>
 <loc>https://coolzone.website/about.html</loc>
 <lastmod>2019-05-23T14:32:00+00:00</lastmod>
 <priority>0.80</priority>
</url>
<url>
 <loc>https://coolzone.website/contact.html</loc>
 <lastmod>2019-05-23T14:32:00+00:00</lastmod>
 <priority>0.80</priority>
</url>
<url>
 <loc>https://coolzone.website/haha-funny-meme.jpg</loc>
 <lastmod>2019-05-23T14:32:00+00:00</lastmod>
 <priority>0.80</priority>
</url>
</urlset>

It's a nifty file that makes it to where Google doesn't have to work so hard "crawling around" your site looking for those links itself. And hey, anything that makes Google happy should make you happy, right?

It's good SEO to have one, so let's break it down. A sitemap is an XML file, that's "extensible markup language," a kind of code. Basically, it's a way to store information that both robots and humans can read, if they know how. What we're storing here are (usually) 3 things: the link to each web page in your website, when it was last modified, and what it's "priority" is. I won't get too technical, that's not really the kind of blog-person I am, but by making a file like this and making it accessible to Google, you can make sure that Google is finding everything you want it to find.

Take for instance someone who uses a service like Wix. I'm going to pick on Wix specifically but it's not by any means the only service with this issue. Wix is a dynamic website builder kind of service - and that's great! No code required, meaning anybody can pick it up and focus purely on content and aesthetic. But the big drop off of using a service like that is the SEO. If you've ever been so brave as to right click on a Wix site and click "view page source," you might be greeted with a mess that looks like this:

HTML might be confusing if you're not a coder, but NOBODY can read this mess. That's not to say it's a bad site, it's just having to do a lot of dynamic code to generate what you want it to look like - far more code than most static sites have. In this case, a consequence of all this dynamic code Google has a harder time finding its way around, and it may not find all the resources you want it to find, hurting your SEO in the process. That sucks!

But Blog-King Jack, I know not how to make a sitemap, for I am not a technical individual!
You, again

Yes, yes I know. But by the power of the internet, I'll show you some ways to do it without all that yucky learning. I present to you, the one stop shop for XML sitemap generation:

https://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

I've used this site a lot in my website making adventures. All you have to do is enter the link to your public website, and let it do its thing for a few minutes. Then, it spits a file right out for you. Usually it doesn't miss pages for me, but especially confusing websites can still be hard for this site crawler. In that case, you'll have to edit it yourself somewhat.

If you find yourself having to do that, I'm sorry. But let's look at that code from earlier again.

[coolzone.website/sitemap.xml]
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<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"></urlset>
<url>
 <loc>https://coolzone.website/</loc>
 <lastmod>2019-05-23T14:32:00+00:00</lastmod>
 <priority>1.00</priority>
</url>
<url>
 <loc>https://coolzone.website/about.html</loc>
 <lastmod>2019-05-23T14:32:00+00:00</lastmod>
 <priority>0.80</priority>
</url>
<url>
 <loc>https://coolzone.website/contact.html</loc>
 <lastmod>2019-05-23T14:32:00+00:00</lastmod>
 <priority>0.80</priority>
</url>
<url>
 <loc>https://coolzone.website/haha-funny-meme.jpg</loc>
 <lastmod>2019-05-23T14:32:00+00:00</lastmod>
 <priority>0.80</priority>
</url>
</urlset>

Here we have four pages,

The home page ("/")
about.html
contact.html
haha-funny-meme.jpg (an image)

Notice how most of the file looks the same, except for those links. If you really need to edit this thing by hand, open up the sitemap file it gives you, it should look roughly like this template:

[Sitemap.xml template]
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<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"></urlset>
<!-- DON'T TOUCH ANYTHING ABOVE HERE -->
<url>
 <loc>https://your.website/</loc>
 <lastmod>TIMECODE - DO NOT CHANGE</lastmod>
 <priority>1.00</priority>
</url>
<!-- REPEAT THE ABOVE SECTION FOR EACH PAGE ON YOUR SITE -->
</urlset>

Once you've done what you have to do, you're ready to set up your sitemap for Google. This involves getting it uploaded to your site root, which is a process that varies so much between services and hosting providers I can't even begin to help you with that. Juts make sure that once you're done, you're able to go to:

www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml

After that, it's time to inform Google that you exist! If you haven't done this already, head on over to https://www.google.com/webmast... and set your site up. This is a fantastic tool that Google provides to help your search rankings - don't take it lightly! This is GOOGLE helping you out with GOOGLE, people, come on!

I hope this wasn't too confusing and that you learned a little something. Need even more help with your SEO and stuff? Well, golly gee, Blue Fish sure is good at all that junk... just email hi@bluefishds.com if you want... Thanks for reading, have a good day!