XML sitemaps just turned 18 in June, and in honor of its full-fledged introduction into adulthood, I’m breaking down how XML sitemaps work, how to build one, and why XML sitemaps offer a boatload of SEO benefits.
What is an XML sitemap?
In a nutshell, an XML sitemap is a protocol in XML format that tells search engines about the URLs on a website available to crawl.
XML sitemaps were meant to share information about each URL, like:
- When it was last updated.
- How often it changes.
- How important it is in relation to other URLs across your website.
XML sitemaps allow search engines to crawl your website more efficiently if certain URLs are isolated.
If you’re an SEO professional, you probably already use XML sitemaps built into your Yoast WordPress plugin. But there are plenty of extras that you might be missing.
How to build a dynamic XML sitemap
If you’re using WordPress, leverage SEO plugins like Yoast and RankMath to generate a dynamic XML sitemap.
If you’re not using WordPress, follow these steps to build a dynamic XML sitemap.
Understand your navigational structure
Pull together a list of all our URLs on the website and group them to align to navigational structure and content groupings.
Partner with your developer team
Share the list of URLs grouped together with your dev team to gain their help in creating a dynamic XML sitemap using Python, PHP, or JavaScript.
Here is an example of how to code a dynamic XML sitemap using Python:
import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET...
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