Sitemap is a xml format document that lists URLs with metadata in websites, originally introduced in 2005 by Google, and now supported by all the well-known search engines, which can help webmasters to inform search engines about the pages on their sites that are available for crawling, so it’s also an important part of SEO(Search Engine Optimization).

The metadata in the sitemap of a certain URL contains the last updated datetime, the frequency of page changes, importance, relative to other URLs in the site, than makes search engines more intelligently crawl and display the site.

Sitemap example – https://www.peterdavehello.org/sitemap.xml

For more details:

• http://www.sitemaps.org/
• https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/156184
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Site_map
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sitemaps (The protocol)

Do not have sitemap for your website? Try some sitemap generators:

• https://www.xml-sitemaps.com/
• https://xmlsitemapgenerator.org/

If you are using WordPress as I do, try to use a sitemap plugin:

• Google XML Sitemaps
  • https://wordpress.org/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/
• WP Sitemap Page
  • https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-sitemap-page/
• Better WordPress Google XML Sitemaps
  • https://wordpress.org/plugins/bwp-google-xml-sitemaps/
• Google Sitemap by BestWebSoft
  • https://wordpress.org/plugins/google-sitemap-plugin/

(The Jetpack by WordPress.com official plugin also provides sitemap feature)

Don’t forget to validate your sitemap, these sitemap validators can help webmasters to validate the sitemap of websites:

• https://webmaster.yandex.com/sitemaptest.xml
• http://www.validome.org/google/
• http://tools.seochat.com/tools/site-validator/
• https://www.xml-sitemaps.com/validate-xml-sitemap.html
• http://freetools.webmasterworld.com/tools/site-validator/