Best Practices for Organizing and Structuring Your Sitemap

A sitemap is an essential tool for any website, providing users and search engines with a clear understanding of the structure and content of the website.

Organizing and structuring a sitemap effectively can greatly improve the user experience, making it easier for users to find what they want. It can also impact the website’s search engine optimization (SEO).

In this article, we will explore the best practices for organizing and structuring a sitemap to ensure that it provides the best possible user experience and helps to improve SEO.

Benefits of Sitemaps

Here is a brief explanation of the benefits of creating sitemaps:

• Increased Website Crawlability: Sitemaps provide search engines with a roadmap of your website’s structure, making it easier for them to crawl and index your pages. This can lead to faster indexing and improved visibility. You can confirm if your website has an XML sitemap by checking the content analysis section of the Eye10 On-Page SEO tool.

• Better Content Management: You get a clearer and more organized view of your website’s structure with a sitemap, making it easier for you and your developers to manage content and make changes.
• Locating Orphan Pages: A sitemap can help search engines discover pages on a website that is not accessible through the site’s normal navigation structure. This is especially important for larger websites, where pages can be “orphaned” and not linked to any other page on the site.
• Identifying Duplicate Content: Duplicate content can be a problem for websites, as search engines may not know which version of a page to index and rank. A sitemap can help Google distinguish between duplicate pages by providing information about the preferred version of a page.

Best Practices for Creating Sitemaps

The following are the top best practices for creating a sitemap for your website:

1. Use sitemap generators to automate the process

Sitemap generators make creating sitemaps easier and more efficient by automatically generating a sitemap based on the website’s content and structure. You can achieve this using your regular CMS, WordPress, or alternative plugins and tools, such as Yoast, Screaming Frog, etc.

2. List only canonical URLs

Including multiple versions of the same URL in your sitemap can confuse and result in duplicate content, harming your SEO. By listing only the canonical URL, you ensure that there is only one version of each page in your sitemap, reducing the risk of duplicates.

3. Use UTF-8 encoding

UTF-8 is a widely-used character encoding standard compatible with many devices and platforms, including web browsers and search engines. Using UTF-8 encoding in your sitemap ensures that it will be properly displayed and readable by many devices and platforms, as against ASCII encoding.

4. Never list your Noindex URLs

It would be best if you never listed your noindex URLs in your sitemap because they are URLs that you don’t want search engines to index. By including these URLs in your sitemap, you are telling search engines that they should crawl and index them, which is the opposite of what you want. The Eye10 On-Page SEO tool also helps you determine the presence of no-index URLs on your website.

5. Submit your sitemap properly

Your sitemap should be placed in the root directory of your website so that it is easily accessible to search engines. Also, you can submit your sitemap to search engines such as Google and Bing through their webmaster tools. Log in to your webmaster tools account (for Google, it’s the Search Console), find the option to submit a sitemap, and enter the URL of your sitemap.

6. Prioritize high-quality pages in your sitemap

High-quality pages are more likely to rank higher in search results than low-quality pages. By prioritizing these pages in your sitemap, you are helping ensure that your website is more visible to users and that the pages most important to you receive the visibility they deserve. These high-quality pages are also more likely to receive internal and external links.

7. Break large sitemaps into multiple files

Large sitemaps can take longer for search engines to process, slowing down the crawl process and impacting your website’s ranking and visibility. By breaking large sitemaps into smaller, more manageable files, you are helping ensure that search engines can crawl and index your website more efficiently. Large sitemaps are also obviously more difficult to maintain.

8. Don’t create a sitemap if you don’t have to 

While creating a sitemap is not a requirement for a website, there are certain reasons why you might choose to do so:

• Large website: This is especially important if your website has a complex structure and it is difficult for search engines to crawl all of your pages without a sitemap, particularly for websites with over 500 pages.
• Inadequate internal link strategy: If your internal link strategy is not comprehensive, a sitemap can be used to help search engines find all of your pages. Before creating a sitemap, though, you should probably fix your link-building strategy. You can check the types of links that you have on your website through the Eye10 Backlink Checker tool and then use the Backlink Monitor tool to analyze the performance of your link-building strategy.

• Rich media content: By providing information about the rich media content on your website (if it contains many images, videos, etc.), a sitemap can help ensure that it is properly indexed and visible to users.
• New website: A new website can be challenging when getting discovered by Google and other web crawlers. This is because these crawlers rely on following links from one page to another to crawl the web. The crawler might not discover your pages without a sitemap if your site has few external links.

Conclusion

A well-structured sitemap will lead to a more user-friendly and easily accessible website that will likely rank higher in search engines. With the right approach, your sitemap can be a valuable tool that helps your website reach its full potential.

Eye10 SEO tools are integrated with Google tools such as Google Analytics and Google Search Console for reasons such as this: organizing and structuring your sitemaps. Of course, there are a whole lot of other uses to be explored once you sign up for a subscription today.