How To Configure Sitemaps Using Rank Math

Sitemaps are essential parts of any website or blog. Without Sitemaps, it’s difficult for search engines to navigate through your website for crawling.

Sitemap is the most valuable asset for any website or blog to take the first step in the Search Engine Optimization race.

Without a sitemap, your website might also crawl, but it will take longer and won’t be that efficient. Because without a sitemap, search engines won’t know what to crawl and what not to.

We need an SEO plugin to generate customized sitemaps. Rank Math is one of the finest and feature-rich SEO plugins to do that job.

We will learn more about Sitemaps in this article and How To Configure Sitemaps Using Rank Math.

Understanding Sitemaps And Their Importance

What Are Sitemaps?

Google (or other search engines) does not know what is your website all about. For search engines to know about the content of your website, you need to submit some information to search engines.

But how do we do that?

Sitemaps! Yes, with a sitemap search engine can discover the contents of your website and crawl accordingly.

Creating a sitemap is one of the many ways of optimizing a site for SEO. It helps visitors and search engine bots to know your website structure better.

Sitemaps offer a better user experience for visitors and accurate information in a structured way for search engine bots to crawl.

What Is A WordPress Sitemap

A Sitemap, as the name suggests is the complete link map of your site. This is a file that contains all the public URLs of your website. You can control the links that need to be included in a sitemap.

By default, WordPress does not create any sitemaps. You need to manually create it or use WordPress plugins to do that for you.

A sitemap is like a blueprint containing links to all your pages, posts, images, and other stuff you want to include. You will need to create different sitemaps for different types of content.

Why Sitemaps Are Important For SEO?

Either a new site or an old site, Google ( Or other search engines) discover the content of your website by following internal links.

If you have a sitemap with all links to your website, you are making the job of Google easier, as Google can easily find the structure and links of your website and crawl them accordingly.

Websites with sitemaps get crawled quickly and easily compared to ones that do not have a sitemap.

Here are the different scenarios where sitemaps are really important.

Easy Navigation

The structure and the hierarchy of your website in a visual sitemap help visitors to easily navigate through different pages. This improves the overall experience and visitor retention.

Search Engine Optimization

When Google finds it easy to crawl your website content, it may push you up in the search engine result pages. On the other hand, if visitors find it easy to navigate through using sitemaps, they will prefer to come back to your website. So you will be getting benefits from both ways.

Better Crawlability

Google hates if your website does not have a sitemap as it has to do a lot of work to crawl your website. By providing a sitemap, you are making Google happy. Thus Google ( Or other search engines) will crawl and index your website links faster.

Types Of Sitemap

Usually, sitemaps are categorized into two types.

• XML Sitemap [Extensible Markup Language]
• HTML Sitemap [HyperText Markup Language]

Both types play a significant role in optimizing a website in different ways.

XML sitemaps are machine-readable sitemaps meant for search engines whereas HTML sitemaps are visual sitemaps meant for human visitors.

XML Sitemap

An XML sitemap is usually for the consumption of search engines. It contains URLs of all contents of your blog along with other information like when the content was created and when the content was modified, how many images are there in the content, etc.

XML (Extensible Markup Language) is machine-readable language useful for search engines to crawl your website content easily and quickly

Though XML sitemap is accessible to common visitors, it’s of no use to them. Search engine crawler detects XML sitemap and crawls all links available in the sitemap.

In WordPress, you can create sitemaps for different content like posts, pages, images, categories, etc. When there is a change in content, XML sitemap files also get updated for search engines to crawl the updated content.

Benefits Of XML Sitemap

The main benefit of XML sitemap is that it helps your website content to get crawled easily.

There is no guarantee that all links of the website will be crawled and indexed but at least Google will be aware of your website content.

One more benefit is that whenever your website content is updated, the same gets updated in the sitemaps and eventually gets crawled.

An XML sitemap is also useful to let Google or other search engines know about the media contents of your blog as WordPress creates a separate sitemap for all media contents like images and videos.

HTML Sitemap

Unlike XML sitemaps which are purely for search engines, HTML sitemaps are for general visitors. It helps them to navigate your website easily. It also gives an overview of your website content along with links so that they can access their preferred content.

Benefits Of HTML Sitemaps

Although HTML sitemaps do not have an impact on SEO or overall blog visibility, they add value to your website. Visitors will be pleased to get all content links on one page instead of browsing all pages and categories.

Introduction to Rank Math

What Is Rank Math?

Rank Math is a popular WordPress SEO plugin that offers a wide range of features to help website owners optimize their sites for search engines. It provides tools for on-page SEO, keyword optimization, rich snippets, and more.

To learn more about Rank Math, I would suggest you read the Rank Math Review article where we explained almost all the features of Rank Math.

Why Rank Math Is A Popular Choice For Configuring Sitemaps

Rank Math stands out as a popular choice for configuring sitemaps due to its intuitive sitemap settings and seamless integration with Google Search Console. It offers the flexibility to customize sitemaps based on the specific needs of a website.

Configuring Sitemaps In Rank Math

You can create both XML sitemap and HTML sitemap using Rank Math.

Configure XML Sitemap Using Rank Math

Creating an XML sitemap is very easy using Rank Math. You just need to follow the below instructions and you are good to go.

You can access the basic settings of the sitemap on the Setting Wizard page as shown below.

First of all, you need to enable “Sitemap” from the Rank Math dashboard and then access the Rank Math settings.

To access Rank Math Sitemap setting, you can click on RankMath -> Sitemap Setting

Once you click on the Sitemap Settings, you will be shown the below window. Under General, you can change the following settings.

Your sitemap URL will be shown at the top of the window. The same you need to copy and submit to search engines.

You can go to the individual settings page for each item listed on the left side and change the settings accordingly. For example, the below image shows the setting page for “Posts“.

The following sitemaps are available in Rank Math. However, the setting will be available only when the specific module or the plugin is installed. For example, the product sitemap setting will be available only when you have the Woocommerce plugin installed.

Here is the snippet of what RankMath XML sitemaps look like.

How To Submit XML Sitemaps To Google

Here are the processes that you can follow to submit a sitemap to Google.

Configure HTML Sitemaps Using Rank Math?

Like an XML sitemap, creating an HTML sitemap using Rank Math is very easy. Here are the steps that you need to follow.

You need to enable Sitemap in the Rank Math dashboard and access the RankMath settings. The process is explained before in Step-1 and Step-2.

To access the HTML Sitemap under RankMath general settings, you need to click on the option shown below.

You need to “Check” on “HTML Sitemap” to enable the feature.

You can set the below option under the RankMath HTML Sitemap settings page.

Here is a snippet of what the RiansTech HTML sitemap looks like with the above settings.

Here is a nice video by the Rank Math team to show how to create an HTML sitemap using Rank Math.

Do I Need To Use Both Types Of Sitemap?

I would prefer to use both as XML site map is a must for search engines and HTML sitemap is good for visitors. If you have both sitemaps it will add value to your website in terms of search appearance and website credibility.

Conclusion: How To Configure Sitemaps Using Rank Math

In conclusion, sitemaps play a crucial role in SEO by helping search engines understand and index the content on a website. Configuring sitemaps using Rank Math offers a user-friendly and effective way to ensure that a website’s content is properly indexed and visible in search engine results.

By using Rank Math, website owners can take advantage of its intuitive sitemap settings and seamless integration with Google Search Console to optimize their website’s visibility. I encourage all website owners to consider implementing sitemap configuration using Rank Math to enhance their SEO efforts and improve their website’s performance in search engine results.

Although the free version is more than enough if you want to extract all the benefits that Rank Math offers you need to switch to a premium plan.