Sitemaps are a very important factor towards getting traffic to your website as they help the search engines to crawl your website more effectively. In this post at TryingGeek, you will learn about how to create sitemap for your wordpress blog and submit your sitemap to google.   The Sitemap is basically a page on your blog with all the links to your posts, pages, etc. It also contains the priority of the links, the date modified and the frequency of update of the posts. This helps the search engine to set a frequency in which it crawls your blog. This is helpful for the search indexing of your blog.

Why do we need a sitemap?

As you read above, Sitemaps are a page with all the links to your blog posts, pages, etc. So you may be thinking that it is the same as an archive. Why do we create sitemap if we already have an archive? What is the Difference between a Sitemap and an Archive? Basically, an Archive is Reader oriented whereas a Sitemap is Search Engine Oriented. Didn't get that? The Readers only need a page with the links to the posts so that they could search for an interesting article and read it. But the Sitemap needs way more information than that, it needs to understand the update frequency of your blog, it needs the priority of the pages and they need the time of last update so that they can automatically set a frequency of crawling your blog. That is the basic difference between the Sitemap and the Archive. For Example, If there are 2 websites, one is a news website and other is a Travel Blog. The News Blog is updated every 1-2 hours when a breaking news is published, but the Travel Blog is updated once in 1-2 months when the Author of the Travel Blog goes to travel. So how will the search engine differentiate between the 2 blogs? First lets understand the need of differentiating between the 2 blogs. If the search engine does not differentiate between the blogs then it will waste time crawling the travel blog every hour and waste their resources and time or it will crawl the news blog once in 2-3 days and the breaking news will become outdated till it gets indexed on the search engine. So now we understand the importance to set different crawl intervals for different blogs. Now lets come back to the question, How will the search engine differentiate between the 2 blogs? It will take help from the sitemap where it will collect the info about the update frequency of the posts and it will also come to know about the priority of the links and it will accordingly set up a time interval for the crawling of the blog. From above you know that the sitemaps are useful for the search engines. But you may be asking, ''what's in for us?''. Well its simple, if we help the search engine to set a crawl frequency for your blog then the chances of higher search rank increases as we have a page where we have all the links which we want the search engine to index so the crawler bot will not waste time in crawling the useless pages of our blog and we get profited. So now we know the benefits of a Sitemap so now lets move on to the next step that is, How to create sitemap for your blog?

How to Create Sitemap for your WordPress Blog?

Creating sitemaps for your wordpress blog is a quite easy task that can be easily done by using a famous plugin which is named Yoast SEO. Yoast SEO has both paid and free versions. You can create a sitemap with the free version itsel. Just install the plugin and head over to Yoast settings and enable sitemap. Now when you will add a new post to your blog, the sitemap will be automatically generated and you don't have to worry about updating the sitemap manually, the plugin updates it automatically. That's how you can make sitemaps for yoir wordpress website or blog easily.