In this video you’re going to learn how to create and tweak your sitemap using your Yoast SEO plugin.
In your dashboard menu go to SEO > XML Sitemaps. If you don’t see XML Sitemaps then you’ll need to enable Advanced Settings which is under SEO > Dashboard > Features.
Make sure that XML sitemap functionality is Enabled.
Click on XML Sitemap and you’ll most likely see “Oops! That Page Can’t Be Found.”
That’s because even though you have sitemaps enabled you need a couple of tweaks to get it working properly.
Go to User sitemap and Enable and save changes.
Now Post Types. You can choose which post types you want to include in your sitemap. Posts, pages, media and, depending on what plugins you have there may be other options here too.
This video shows my Free and Cheap eBooks website. As this is a membership site there are a lot of pages that I don’t want people to find through the sitemap back door, so I don’t include pages in the sitemap.
Think about this for your own needs. If you want some pages to be included then you can add exclusions for any that you want to hide. You can exclude posts individually too.
Save changes.
When you’ve finished tweaking then check your sitemap either through the link or by typing domain.com/sitemap.xml or domain.com/sitemap_index.xml in your browser. Check to make sure that any pages or posts you want to hide are not included in your sitemap.
The next step is to submit your sitemap to Google and the other search engines.
Please scroll down for comments.
I so far used All-in-one-seo, but with one website I am trying out yoast. Your video is very helpful and gives me information about things I haven’t known so far. I will check it all out.
One question I have. A German friend advised me that I would need a sitemap in the footer in order that the visitors can easily find the content of the site when clicking on it. I am a little confused as I am hearing normally that sitemaps are for the search engines and not for website visitors. Do they talk about the same thing? Any idea?
Search engines use sitemaps, people use menus. Most websites have a menu at the top of the page and/or in a sidebar. There’s no need for another one in the footer unless you particularly want to have one.