Create a Sitemap File and Robots.txt

A sitemap can be said to be a protocol that enables a website owner, or operator inform or notify Google and other search engines that they have pages on the website that are available for crawling.

Sitemaps act as the map that leads search engines to your website pages.

Ordinarily, while indexing, it is very much possible for Google to miss these web pages of yours and that would significantly affect your SEO chances.

Sitemaps inform and remind the search engines that you have web pages that are available to be crawled and indexed.

Generating sitemaps is pretty much easy process.

In fact, it is so simple that there are many websites that could help you do it, an example is https://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ 

After visiting the page, you would be asked to follow four easy steps on your way to generating your own XML sitemap.

There are also tools that help you easily make a sitemap to your Wordpress website. An example of this is YOAST SEO.

The file called robots.txt is another important file in some circumstances. It helps you preventing Google from indexing some parts on your site that should not be indexed (example /wp-admin/ ). This can be done also applying the noindex property to any page.

Why Is It important?

Internal linking can be very effective as long as SEO is concerned, but in cases where your internal linking skill is not perfect, sitemaps can come in. Now, imagine using both of them together.

What a sitemap does for a website is to show Google and other search engines your most important pages. This will increase your chances of being indexed by Google which will, in turn, increase your SEO ranking and help draw in more traffic to your website, and once more traffic starts coming in, we all know what that means – more revenue.

When used optimally with internal linking, it enables Google’s crawler bot (Googlebot) to find your web pages much faster and easier and is more likely to be suggested to users who seek information your website has.

Once the sitemap is created, it's suggested to submit your sitemap to Google and Bing

By the upload of the sitemap to Google (in your Search Console account) you're making life easier for the search engine, as it has a good index to follow and ultimately that's good for you.

In order to use sitemaps to their maximum potential, it is important for website owners to put their best and most important web pages on the sitemap. This is because first impression matters and users are more likely to visit other web pages of yours if they liked what they initially saw.

Top 5 SEO Tools for creating sitemaps:

• DYNOMAPPER.COM (Free): DYNO Mapper Makes it easy to plan the info structure of your website. Google analytics metrics can be used to visually sort your pages.
• SLICKPLAN.COM (Free): released in 2009 and has helped to create visual sitemaps which were and continues to remain a need. Enhancing the communication of design planning as well as the architectural planning of developer clients.
• MINDMUP.COM (Free): This mind mapping tool can be gotten for free and is open-source. Based in the cloud, users can quickly come up with mind maps which they may share a bookmark for their friends.
• GOOGLE SITEMAP GENERATOR FOR MS2 (Free): Google XML sitemap generator which comes with multilingual product support and multilingual category support.
• WRITEMAPS.COM (Free): Writemaps helps in the creation of sitemaps with its sitemap builder which is different from other sitemap creators. Its sitemap builder helps you manually create the sitemaps that you want and is very ideal for small projects.

Top 5 WordPress Plugins to create XML Sitemaps for your site

• All in One SEO Pack (Free+Paid): Comes with a wide range of features. One of its sitemap settings is an XML sitemap that is regularly used while the other is an image XML sitemap giving you the capability of Google and Bing submission.
• Yoast SEO (Free+Paid): go to the General page, and you will be able to access the XML sitemap link from the Features tab with the ability to either enable the sitemap or totally get it disabled.
• Google XML Sitemaps (Free): If you don’t want to install and configure an SEO plugin on your website, then the Google XML Sitemaps plugin is a wonderful stand-alone solution.
• Simple Wp Sitemap (Free): this sitemap plugin has the ability to generate XML as well as HTML sitemaps. Updates are automated each time posts all pages are published.
• Google Sitemap by BestWebSoft (Paid): Now you can auto-generate XML sitemaps for WordPress sites while giving search engines the ability to index your blog. With this plugin, web crawlers can easily interact with a website’s structure in a more effective manner.

Did you know? Google suggests that sitemaps are more beneficial to really large websites, websites with large archives, new websites with just a few external links to it, and websites which use rich media content

Expert’s suggestion: “Generating a sitemap is easy when you have the right tools, such as auditing software with a built-in XML sitemap generator or popular plugins like Google XML sitemaps.” – Aleh Baryseich (https://www.searchenginejournal.com/xml-sitemap-best-practices/237649/)