Making Sense of Sitemaps

Sitemaps help search engines successfully crawl your website by making it easier to find all the site's pages and links. A sitemap is not required for a website, but it can help improve search engine optimization.

What is a sitemap?

A sitemap is a file that lists the URLs of a website. The file should also include meta data about each link including its importance to the site and the last time it was updated. A sitemap is used by search engines and crawlers to navigate the site and optimize visibility.

Where do I put the sitemap?

Make sure your sitemap is in the root, or top-level directory of your Web server.

Can I exclude pages from my sitemap?

Yes, you can exclude specific pages of your website from your sitemap. On the Search Engine Visibility Sitemap page, select the pages you want to exclude, and then click Exclude Selected.

Creating your sitemap

Search Engine Visibility provides an easy-to-use option for creating your sitemap. From the Optimize tab, select Sitemap to get started.
Use the checkboxes to specify which URLs to include or exclude from your sitemap, and then click Get Site Map.

For additional information, see What is a Sitemap?