{"id":71611,"date":"2023-07-07T14:47:54","date_gmt":"2023-07-07T14:47:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mailrelay.com\/glossary\/sitemap\/"},"modified":"2026-10-02T15:25:39","modified_gmt":"2026-10-02T15:25:39","slug":"sitemap","status":"publish","type":"glossary","link":"https:\/\/mailrelay.com\/en\/glossary\/sitemap\/","title":{"rendered":"Sitemap"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A sitemap is a file that compiles the list of web pages that make up a website, and provides information about the different files on the website, as well as the relationships between them. They are especially useful for search engine crawlers to index the website more efficiently.<\/p>\n<p>Basically, a sitemap file is saved as sitemap.xml and is usually hosted at the root of the website, for example: <code>webdeejemplo.com\/sitemap.xml<\/code>, but this is not a mandatory rule. There is also the possibility, among other options, to use sitemap as a .html file (sitemap.html) but the most popular because of its importance for SEO is: sitemap.xml.<\/p>\n<h2>1. Is a sitemap necessary?<\/h2>\n<p>Yes, having a sitemap is always recommended and very valuable. It doesn&#8217;t matter if we think we have a small website (fewer than 500 pages), if you don&#8217;t have many multimedia files (images and videos) on your website, or if your internal linking is perfect\u2026 it is vital so that search engine spiders can index you according to your needs.<\/p>\n<p>That said, let&#8217;s define two scenarios in which it goes from being recommended to being mandatory if you want to help your SEO ranking:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>When you have a very large website.<\/strong> Since it is very possible that web crawlers may overlook some of the new pages (and their content) that you have recently added to your site or may not index those that have been recently updated.<\/li>\n<li><strong>If it is a new or recently created site.<\/strong> It will have few external links pointing to it (<a href=\"https:\/\/mailrelay.com\/en\/glossary\/backlink\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">backlinks<\/a>), which makes it harder for web crawlers to detect your pages. The sitemap will accelerate this indexing process.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2>2. Example of sitemap.xml<\/h2>\n<p>Let&#8217;s see a very simple example so you can get an idea of what a sitemap.xml file looks like. You can see its general structure and in this case, it only states the location of a URL and update date:<\/p>\n<pre><code class=\"language-plaintext\">&lt;?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"UTF-8\"?&gt;\n&lt;urlset &gt;\n  &lt;url&gt;\n    &lt;loc&gt;http:\/\/www.miwebdeejemplo.com\/miprimeraweb.html&lt;\/loc&gt;\n    &lt;lastmod&gt;2022-07-07&lt;\/lastmod&gt;\n  &lt;\/url&gt;\n&lt;\/urlset&gt;<\/code><\/pre>\n<h2>3. How to create a sitemap?<\/h2>\n<p>You can create a sitemap with the help of various tools. Let&#8217;s look at the most common ways to get one:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Create it automatically from your CMS.<\/strong> If you use some type of <a href=\"https:\/\/mailrelay.com\/en\/glossary\/content-management-system-cms\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">CMS<\/a> (content management system), it is very likely that it has already created one for you automatically. But you should check that it fits what you want; you can use WordPress plugins such as Yoast SEO or Better WordPress Google XML Sitemaps to help you.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Create it manually<\/strong>. It is a task that guarantees the file will be exactly how you want it; all you need is a plain text editor such as Windows Notepad or Nano (Linux and macOS). Of course, you have to follow the proper syntax, which you can check in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sitemaps.org\/protocol.html\">The Sitemaps protocol<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Generate it automatically (online or with an application)<\/strong>. There are online tools that let you generate the sitemap.xml without any experience or installing anything, such as XML-sitemaps.com. They can also be generated with applications specialized in these tasks, such as GSiteCrawler or Sitemap Generator.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Related entries<\/h2>\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/mailrelay.com\/en\/glossary\/headers\/\">Headers<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/mailrelay.com\/en\/glossary\/call-to-action-cta\/\">Call to Action (CTA)<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/mailrelay.com\/en\/glossary\/email-marketing-campaign\/\">Email marketing campaign<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/mailrelay.com\/en\/glossary\/newsletter-campaign\/\">Newsletter campaign<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/mailrelay.com\/en\/glossary\/winback-campaign\/\">Winback campaign<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/mailrelay.com\/en\/glossary\/email-marketing-campaign\/\">Email Campaigns<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/mailrelay.com\/en\/glossary\/drip-campaigns\/\">Drip campaigns<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/mailrelay.com\/en\/glossary\/advertising-campaigns\/\">Advertising campaigns<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Find out how <a href=\"https:\/\/mailrelay.com\/en\/\">Mailrelay<\/a> can help you with your email marketing strategy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"template":"","class_list":["post-71611","glossary","type-glossary","status-publish","hentry"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.6 - 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They are especially useful for search engine crawlers to index the website more efficiently. Basically, a sitemap file is saved as&hellip;","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mailrelay.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/glossary\/71611","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mailrelay.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/glossary"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mailrelay.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/glossary"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mailrelay.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/glossary\/71611\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":98348,"href":"https:\/\/mailrelay.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/glossary\/71611\/revisions\/98348"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mailrelay.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=71611"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}