Sitemap generator
Guide search engine bots to your pages, images, and videos
A sitemap is an XML file that lists all web page URLs in a prescribed structure that can be used by search engines, crawlers, and feed readers to access and browse the website using the information associated with each page.
Search engines use a ‘crawl budget’ to determine how many pages to crawl on a website. A sitemap tells them which pages contain relevant content and are most up-to-date, showing which are the most important to index.
ESO’s sitemap generator creates four kinds of sitemaps: XML, HTML, image, and video, according to sitemaps.org standards and Google Sitemap guidelines. The sitemap generator crawls your webpage, gathers page information, and indexes the details to make it easy for search engine bots to crawl your web pages.
Elite Site Optimizer also supports generating sitemaps for JavaScript or Ajax-powered websites. Upon request, these can be added to an ESO user’s sitemap generator options for the account.
Elite Site Optimizer’s Sitemap Generator tool
The different sitemap formats that Elite Site Optimizer offers are:
- XML Sitemap
- HTML Sitemap
- Image Sitemap
- Video Sitemap
On large websites with frequently-updated content, maintaining a sitemap manually is time-consuming. An XML sitemap is useful to all websites. The sitemap generator creates the XML sitemap that will indicate the number of pages, how recently they were updated, how often they are modified, and the level of importance of each page. If the website contains a large number of URLs, then the sitemap generator will split the XML sitemap files limited to 50,000 URLs per sitemap and with an index file.
The HTML sitemap is an index of web page URLs that uses a tree-like structure to show the internal links between pages. In the same way as an XML sitemap, an HTML sitemap helps to show the connections between pages clearly and is an expected feature that helps visitors navigate the website. Elite Site Optimizer’s tools can create a sitemap in HTML format as well as XML, and it can be incorporated into the website’s sitemap web page to help users navigate between pages.
An image sitemap helps search engines crawl and index images and their metadata so they can be found through image searches. The image sitemap contains metadata such as image URL, image title, caption text, description, geo-location data, and license information that is associated with each image. Image sitemaps are generated and stored as separate XML files with the index sitemap file based on the Google guidelines. Having an image sitemap makes website content much more searchable provided that images are properly labeled and tagged.
A video sitemap enables search engines to crawl and index all videos hosted on the website so they and their associated information can produce search results for relevant queries. ESO’s video sitemap generator uses metadata such as video URL, thumbnail image URL, video title, description, video content information, publication date, and video duration. Video sitemaps are generated and stored as separate XML files and multiple files are generated if the website contains more than 50,000 URLs or the sitemap file size is greater than 50MB.
