Sitemaps play a crucial role in search engine optimization (SEO) as they help search engines locate and comprehend your website’s content. For WordPress websites, Yoast SEO is a highly recommended SEO plugin that offers useful sitemap features. If you want to learn how to customize your sitemap in Yoast, here’s a helpful guide.
Step 1: Install Yoast SEO Plugin
Before we can manipulate sitemaps, we need to have Yoast SEO installed and activated on our WordPress site. For that, navigate to the “Plugins” section of your WordPress dashboard, click “Add New,” search for “Yoast SEO,” and click “Install Now” and then “Activate.”
Step 2: Navigate to the Sitemap Settings
With Yoast SEO installed, you can now access its sitemap settings. To do this, go to “SEO” on your dashboard menu and click on “General.” Under “General,” click on the “Features” tab, and you’ll see the “XML sitemaps” option.
Step 3: Enable or Disable Sitemaps
Yoast SEO automatically enables sitemaps for your website. To disable it, click on the “Off” button next to “XML sitemaps.” Conversely, if you want to enable it, just click on the “On” button.
Step 4: Customize Your Sitemap
Yoast SEO provides a way to customize what appears in your sitemap. To customize your sitemap, first, go to “Search Appearance” on the “SEO” menu.
Here, you can decide what content you want to be visible to search engines. For instance, you can opt to show or hide posts, pages, categories, tags, and other types of content by toggling the “Show in search results” option. Remember to save your changes by clicking “Save Changes.”
To edit individual page settings, navigate to the specific page or post you want to modify. Scroll down to the Yoast SEO meta box below the page editor, click on “Advanced,” and set the “Allow search engines to show this Page in search results?” to either “Yes” or “No.”
Step 5: Save and Test Your Sitemap
Once you’re done editing, click “Save Changes.” To ensure that your sitemap is working correctly, you can test it using the Google Search Console. Just paste the URL of your sitemap, which should be in the format of http://yourwebsite.com/sitemap_index.xml.
Conclusion
Editing your sitemap in Yoast SEO is quite straightforward. Doing so helps you manage what content is visible to search engines, thus influencing your site’s SEO performance. Remember to save your changes and test your sitemap after editing.