What Is a Sitemap and How to Submit It to Google Search Console?
That’s what this guide covers. If you’ve ever wondered why some websites are at the top of Google search results while other websites never show up in search results at all, a simple but powerful tool that can be the difference between them is their sitemap. Many Pakistani business owners have spent thousands of dollars getting their websites designed and developed but fail to take one of the most important steps in search engine optimisation (SEO) — creating a sitemap. At NVJ Developers & Designing we always include in the production of every website by default an appropriate sitemap and connecting it to Google Search Console. This complete guide will help you understand what a sitemap is, how it affects your Pakistani business website, and provide you with step-by-step instructions on how to submit your site’s sitemap to Google’s Search Console so that all your pages can be discovered and ranked by Google.
Why You Need a Sitemap?
That’s what this guide covers. If you’ve ever wondered why some websites are at the top of Google search results while other websites never show up in search results at all, a simple but powerful tool that can be the difference between them is their sitemap. Many Pakistani business owners have spent thousands of dollars getting their websites designed and developed but fail to take one of the most important steps in search engine optimisation (SEO) — creating a sitemap. At NVJ Developers & Designing we always include in the production of every website by default an appropriate sitemap and connecting it to Google Search Console. This complete guide will help you understand what a sitemap is, how it affects your Pakistani business website, and provide you with step-by-step instructions on how to submit your site’s sitemap to Google’s Search Console so that all your pages can be discovered and ranked by Google.
Two main types of sitemaps exist; XML sitemaps are in a format that can be understood by computers (search engines) and are submitted through Google Search Console. They are displayed in an XML format, which is different from HMTL sitemaps, which are human-readable web pages on the site to help human users find the information within that website. Each of these types of sitemaps serves a purpose, but the XML sitemap is the more critical type when it comes to how a Pakistani business website will rank on Google.
Why Is a Sitemap Important for Your Website?
Sitemaps are not just technical documents; they represent one of the core foundations of an optimized website. For businesses in Pakistan that are competing in a rapidly growing digital economy, submitting a sitemap via Google Search Console can be a major factor in how fast and thoroughly Google discovers and ranks your content.
One of the primary ways that sitemaps improve website indexing is by dramatically increasing the speed at which new content is indexed by Google. When you create new blog posts, add new service pages, or make updates on your portfolio — all of which are normal functions of a business — Google has to find that new content before it can rank it. In most cases, the process of getting your new content found by Google without a sitemap can take weeks or even months. However, when you properly submit a sitemap, Google is made aware of new content almost as soon as it is published and can typically index that content within hours or just a couple of days. For businesses in Pakistan with a significant amount of new products, services, or blog posts added on a regular basis, the speed of indexing is particularly beneficial.
A sitemap guarantees no important web pages will be overlooked. Websites that contain large amounts of content (like eCommerce stores with thousands of products or blogs with multiple years of content) can sometimes have webpages that Google may never find through standard link following, therefore a properly formatted sitemap enhances every page in your website with “equal opportunity” of appearing on Google’s search engine results pages (SERP) for all relevant search terms.
Secondly, through a sitemap you are able to control the overall SEO of your website. You are able to define the hierarchy of different types of information on your website, such as which web pages hold the most value, how frequently each webpage is changed, and last modification date on each web page. This meta data helps Google determine the order in which to crawl your webpages, ultimately allowing Google to identify and crawl the web pages on your website that have the most value (i.e. key service web pages and high conversion rate landing pages) first.
Types of Sitemaps You Should Know?
An outline of the types of sitemaps that exist provides insight into which approach you should take when creating your site as well as ensuring that you provide the best possible coverage for your entire url structure, which leads to better SEO results for every type of your content.
An XML Sitemap is the standard format of a sitemap used by search engines and displays a complete list of website URLs with their related meta data, including last updated date, frequency of changes, and priority. Creating and submitting an XML Sitemap to Google Search Console for all Pakistani business websites is highly recommended because of the benefits gained by having this type of sitemap made available to search engines.
An Image Sitemap is designed to display a list of all images on a website and allows Google to discover and index the visual aspect of your site. For those in Pakistan who use images extensively in order to present products and services, creating and submitting your Image Sitemap to Google Search Console will ensure that your images are available for display in Google Image Search results and will result in additional traffic being directed toward your website from Google.
This is a video sitemap that works similarly to an image sitemap, but for video content. If your website contains tutorial videos, product demonstrations, or educational content, a video sitemap helps Google understand what videos you have and index them appropriately, with the potential to show in Google video search results.
A news sitemap is targeted toward news articles on publisher websites, which will allow that content to be indexed on Google News. News sites might include Pakistani news in Urdu, blogs on news events, and any commercial websites publishing news-style content on a timely basis.
Mobile Sitemap was designed to indicate, in earlier times, mobile-specific content, although, with mobile-first indexing by Google, the vast majority of modern responsive websites do not need to create a separate mobile sitemap. However, understanding this type is going to help developers in Pakistan to ensure their websites are optimized properly for mobile searches.
Four steps to build a sitemap for your Pakistani website?
There are many articles on how to create sitemaps since it will largely depend on the platform on which your site is built; however, many businesses in Pakistan use the same basic platforms so creating a sitemap should be easy for most businesses to do without much technical expertise.
WordPress Users – If you are building your website with WordPress; the most widely used website-building platform in Pakistan, you will have an easy time creating a sitemap. By using either the Yoast SEO plugin or the Rank Math plugins (both free), the sitemap will be created automatically at the location: yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml. Both of these plugins are commonly used by web designers in Pakistan, free and updated to always reflect the latest changes you make to your site. At NVJ Developers & Designing, we install and configure these plugins as a standard practice for all our client’s WordPress websites.
Shopify Users – If you own an ecommerce store based in Pakistan and use Shopify as your platform; you are also in luck! Your Shopify store will automatically generate an XML sitemap for free at the location of yourstore.myshopify.com/sitemap.xml with no additional setup needed. All you need to do is submit this URL to Google’ search console as we will describe later in this document.
Custom Websites – If your site has been created using custom coding on frameworks like Laravel, React, Next.js or just plain HTML/CSS then you or your web development team will need to create a sitemap for your site either manually or via a dedicated sitemap generating tool. For all of the custom websites we create, NVJ Developers & Designing creates an appropriately formatted XML sitemap from day one for all of our clients.
Websites that Don’t Use a Platform – If you’re not sure what kind of platform your site is built on then you can use one of the several free online sitemap generator tools such as XML-Sitemaps.com or Screaming Frog SEO Spider to crawl your site and create the sitemap automatically. Just enter the URL of your site and allow the crawler to crawl all pages of your site to produce an XML file that you can download.
How Do I Go About Submitting My Sitemap To Google Search Console?
This is probably the most important step; submitting a sitemap to the Google Search Console lets Google (your search engine) know about the existence of your site’s sitemap so they can effectively crawl and index your site. Please adhere to the following steps.
Step 1 — Create an Account on Google Search Console and Verify Site with Code. First visit search.google.com/search-console and sign in to your Google Account (create one if required). Once inside, click ‘Add Property’ and fill in your domain/website URL. Next, you will need to provide proof of ownership; there are three different verification methods: by adding a small HTML Verification tag to the Head section of your website, uploading a Verification File to your server or by connecting to the Google Analytics Account that you set up previously for your Website. At NVJ Developers & Designing; upon completion of the standard SEO Onboarding Process we will complete your Google Search Console Set-Up and Verification for you.
Step 2 — Go to the Sitemaps Section of the App. After successful verification of your Website you can add/mange your Sitemaps from within Google Search Console’s Site Data section. From the left-hand menu click “Sitemaps”, which is listed with the Indexing Section; this will bring you to the Sitemaps Submission screen.
Step 3 — Input Your Sitemap’s URL. The input space is required. You can enter your sitemap path in this input. Generally, your site’s sitemap will be located either at sitemap.xml or sitemap_index.xml for most WordPress websites using either Yoast or Rank Math. If you have a Shopify store, your sitemap most likely also will be located at sitemap.xml, and if you use custom code to build your website, it would be whatever path your development team configured for your sitemap. When you have found and entered the correct sitemap path, click Submit, and Google will begin instantaneously processing it.
Step 4 — Verification of Successful Submission. After successfully submitting your sitemap to Google Search Console, Google Search Console will tell you the status of your sitemap submission, including which URLs were located in your sitemap and which ones have been indexable. It will also show you any errors that occurred during the submission so that you can resolve them (e.g., broken links, incorrect URLs, robot.txt blocking indexable pages).
Step 5 — Schedule to Check Frequently. Your sitemap submission is not a one-off event, as in every time you add new content to your site, you are expected to check your sitemap submission in Google Search Console to make sure it is being properly processed and that the number of indexed pages on your site is increasing. In addition to indexing, you should regularly look for coverage errors, crawl anomalies, or any other issues as your site grows.
BIGGEST Sitemap Mistakes Pakistani Website Owners Are Making?
Even when they mean well, plenty of Pakistani webmasters and developers continue to experience costly and damaging sitemaps. Learning about these common mistakes is an easy way to avoid making these major errors on your site as well.
The most common error is not submitting a sitemap to Google Search Console for indexing purposes. Thousands of businesses in Pakistan do not have a submitted sitemap, so anything that isn’t listed in the Sitemap will go unnoticed by Google and, thus, be indexed poorly. If your website does not have a submitted sitemap at this point, doing so today will have the greatest single impact on improving your SEO.
Another common mistake is including broken or non-functional URLs within your Sitemap. Including URLs in your Sitemap that respond with 404 errors or that are redirected causes wasted crawl budget from Google, and makes it appear as though the site is not properly maintained. Make it a priority to audit your Sitemap regularly to ensure that every URL listed responds with a 200 status code, is functional, and accessible to users.
Many website owners often make the mistake of adding pages to their sitemap that aren’t truly intended for indexing including things such as admin pages, thank-you pages, duplicate content or low-quality tag archive pages. Your sitemap should have only those pages you want Google to find, read and rank. Use your sitemap strategically to tell Google which of your most important pages to find.
Frequently we see another problem, forgetting to update your sitemap after you have added new content. If you add new service pages, publish new blog posts or launch new categories of products without regenerating or updating your current sitemap, Google could take longer to find that new content. If you use WordPress with either Yoast or Rank Math, updating your sitemap and having it auto regenerate happens automatically. If you are using a custom-built website ensure that you either have an automated process to update your sitemap or you are manually regenerating your sitemap after adding significant new content.
Even when they mean well, plenty of Pakistani webmasters and developers continue to experience costly and damaging sitemaps. Learning about these common mistakes is an easy way to avoid making these major errors on your site as well.
The most common error is not submitting a sitemap to Google Search Console for indexing purposes. Thousands of businesses in Pakistan do not have a submitted sitemap, so anything that isn’t listed in the Sitemap will go unnoticed by Google and, thus, be indexed poorly. If your website does not have a submitted sitemap at this point, doing so today will have the greatest single impact on improving your SEO.
Another common mistake is including broken or non-functional URLs within your Sitemap. Including URLs in your Sitemap that respond with 404 errors or that are redirected causes wasted crawl budget from Google, and makes it appear as though the site is not properly maintained. Make it a priority to audit your Sitemap regularly to ensure that every URL listed responds with a 200 status code, is functional, and accessible to users.
Many website owners often make the mistake of adding pages to their sitemap that aren’t truly intended for indexing including things such as admin pages, thank-you pages, duplicate content or low-quality tag archive pages. Your sitemap should have only those pages you want Google to find, read and rank. Use your sitemap strategically to tell Google which of your most important pages to find.
Frequently we see another problem, forgetting to update your sitemap after you have added new content. If you add new service pages, publish new blog posts or launch new categories of products without regenerating or updating your current sitemap, Google could take longer to find that new content. If you use WordPress with either Yoast or Rank Math, updating your sitemap and having it auto regenerate happens automatically. If you are using a custom-built website ensure that you either have an automated process to update your sitemap or you are manually regenerating your sitemap after adding significant new content.
Google Search Console & Sitemap- Further Techniques?
When your company is familiar with the basic requirements of submitting a sitemap, NVJ Developers & Designing assists clients with finding additional ways to maximize their visibility in Google and their SEO efforts.
Separate sitemaps are a great option for those who have an extremely large site. Google’s guidelines indicate that you should create separate sitemaps for each of the different types of content on your site, i.e., Main Pages, Blog Posts, Images, & Videos. When you create your sitemap index file, it will list out all of these individual sitemaps, allowing Google to easily find & process your entire site with organization. It will especially help in having a large ecommerce store or a large blog that has a good number of archived posts more easily browsable through the edges of all their categories.
Prioritize your important pages by assigning priority values to your pages in your XML Sitemap. A page with a value of 1.0 would indicate to Google that it is your most critical content type. Already far less critical would be a page with an assigned priority value of .5 or a page with an assigned priority value of .3. Use this function to ensure that the majority of attention & effort goes into those pages that produce the greatest return to you, e.g., your service pages, your main product categories & pages that convert the best.
Linking Google Search Console to your Google Analytics account provides more accurate information about how well your website is performing on search engines. Some benefits of connecting these two tools include being able to identify the keywords driving traffic to your site’s pages, seeing how often each page was displayed on Google’s search results pages, and identifying areas where you could improve your rankings by optimizing specific pages. Having access to both of these tools allows you as a business owner in Pakistan to gain valuable insights into how you can continually improve your SEO strategies over time.
The Importance of Technical SEO for your Website?
At NVJ Developers and Designer we see that technical SEO components (i.e., Sitemaps, Robots.Txt Files, Canonical tags, and Schema Markup etc.) are not optional, but rather basic building blocks that define whether or not your website is going to be successful in Google Search Engine Rankings or not. All of the websites that we design and develop for our Pakistani Clients include proper XML Sitemaps, a complete Google Search Engine Console Configuration, Google Analytics Integration, On-Page SEO Optimization.
We provide service to businesses throughout Pakistan; for instance, in cities such as Karachi, Lahore, Islamabad, Faisalabad, Rawalpindi, Peshawar, Multan etc. Whether you need a new website built from scratch, an all-around SEO audit and revision to an already existing website, continuous content marketing and blog development, or a total digital marketing plan, NVJ Developers and Designers have the qualifications and experience necessary to produce true measurable results.
We continuously keep ourselves able to produce optimal web pages for our customers by staying current with all of the new Google algorithm updates as well as other technical SEO best practices. Therefore, your Web Page is always going to be optimally designed according to today’s methods, rather than being simply outdated methods which may no longer work or harm your rankings.
Final Thoughts?
Sitemaps are an effective tool in SEO and are very easy to use. They provide Google with a list of all of the different types of content on your website, allowing Google to find those pages quickly, and therefore index them quickly. A sitemap also gives you control over how search engines will interpret your content and how they will prioritize your content for ranking in search engine results. Submitting a sitemap through Google Search Console is simple and only takes a few minutes, yet it brings tremendous long-term benefits to your website’s SEO.
If you haven’t submitted a sitemap yet, do it! If you are looking for a company to help you with establishing a complete technical foundation for your website, reach out to NVJ Developers & Designing — a recognized leader in Pakistan for web development solutions and digital marketing solutions.