4.4 Understanding The Sitemap

A quiet work day; Photo by Tiffany Davidson

a sitemap is how you communicate with search engine robots; they will index & rank you according to how well you communicate with them.

You’ve heard me mention sitemap at least a dozen times already in this course. I decided to wait until now to explain it though. The reason? Because at this point you’ve learned keyword research and on-page techniques and it will make a lot more sense to you now.

When people use the word sitemap, they can be referring to three different types:

sometimes a “sitemap” is created by a designer to show the plan for a website
some sitemaps are flow chart diagrams to show the web pages and connections within a website
other times, a sitemap is used to mean the structured listing intended for web crawlers such as search engine robots

It’s this third definition we refer to when discussing SEO.

To be clear—

What do I mean by sitemap?

Anytime I use the term sitemap, I’m referring to an XML file that consolidates all page information of an entire website into one place for web crawlers to read, index, and use to rank a website for specific keywords.

Where to find the sitemap?

To see your sitemap, simply go to the homepage of the site in question, then add /sitemap.xml to the end of the URL and hit Enter.

This is done in your Internet browser address bar.

For example, to see the sitemap file of my main web design + SEO website, I would go to the homepage or type it into my address bar: https://tiffany-davidson.com and then add /sitemap.xml to the end. So the URL in the address bar would be: https://www.tiffany-davidson.com/sitemap.xml.

If you click that link, you’ll see an example of what a sitemap looks like. See how all of my keywords appear for search engines to index? That’s exactly what all SEO efforts are for- to enhance this sitemap.

You can go look at sitemaps of all kind of different websites. Just go to the homepage of the site, then add /sitemap.xml to the end of the URL in the address bar and hit Enter. That is your XML “file”.

**The whole point of seo is to build the sitemap in a strategic way**

All of the techniques we’re learning in this course have a single ultimate goal: to optimize our sitemap and give it direction by populating it with our target keywords.

All of those filenames and captions you added to images, all of the titles and URLs using keywords, and placing keywords in your headers when possible… all of that contributes to this optimized sitemap.

I can look at a sitemap and tell if they have implemented an SEO strategy or not. As you develop your SEO skills, you’ll be able to do the same.

In the past, I’ve had clients tell me how they “hired an SEO company last year and spent $12,000”, but I go look at their sitemap and it’s all over the place. No clear keyword-driven strategy whatsoever.

Sitemap tells all :)

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Tiffany Davidson Squarespace SEO Expert Course

Welcome to Squarespace SEO Expert! In this course I'm going to teach you the exact process I use to rank Squarespace websites on Google Page 1, using no paid advertising, only organic SEO techniques. If at any point you have questions, please use the comment feature at the bottom of the particular lesson you have a question about. I'm happy to help!