When Kevin Tracy ordered us to return KTracy.com to a hand coded static site, we apparently failed to take into account the importance of the sitemap.

What is a Sitemap?

Sitemaps are files provided on a website that provide information about the content on that website; which are used by search engines to more quickly and efficiently crawl through your website and determine what's new and when it was last modified.

Without sitemaps, search engines like Google are less likely to index (make searchable) your entire website. By providing a sitemap, algorithms from each search engine will make decisions about how often it should index your site looking for new content.

This is likely part of the reason why our SEO at KTracy.com has remained below our standards despite aggressive but meaningful keyword placement, incredible response times relative to WordPress, and continuously making KTracy.com more mobile friendly.

How Does One Create A Sitemap?

The good news is that most website development kits and Content Management Systems (CMS) will automatically create a sitemap for you. If you use Joomla, Drupal, WordPress, or anything like that; then your sitemap is automatically generated and made available to Google, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, Bing, and Webcrawler (for those of you who love the early web).

The bad news is that if you hand code your HTML and PHP in something like NotePad++, you've got to develop a solution to automatically update your sitemap, generate a sitemap using software or web apps and upload it manually, or just ignore the sitemap because you don't need it.

When Wouldn't I Need A Sitemap?

If your website directory structure is relatively simple and all site-wide links are accessible in your index file, you probably don't need a sitemap as a basic web crawler will figure it out pretty quickly on its own.

Also, by the same logic, if you have all of your content on one page (like a resume or business card site), you won't need a sitemap because there's only one destination with no purpose for a map to lead a crawler anywhere else.

Finally, if your site is for your personal purposes and you don't care if people discover it, then there's no need for a sitemap because you don't need web crawlers to index your website.

How We Generate Our Sitemap

This is not a long term solution. However, we wanted a sitemap fast, so we're automatically generating different sitemaps using XML-sitemaps.com.

In just a few minutes, this website will do a detailed crawl of your site and generate XML, HTML, and ROR sitemaps along with a URL list in a ZIP file. You'll have to manually extract these files and place them in your FTP. The downside to this approach is that we should be updating the sitemap every time the site is updated.

In the long run, we plan on developing something in Linux to automatically update the sitemap every day around 4am. However, this automation won't likely happen until mid or late 2023.

Realistically, we're not going to update this sitemap that often when we're all so busy with a ton of other projects in development on this site. Instead, we're only going to update the sitemap every week or two unless there are some time-sensitive posts we're adding.

The Long Term Plan for Sitemaps on our Static Site

2023 is going to be the year of automation for KTracy.com. Thankfully, because this website is technically simple relative to a CMS like WordPress, creating automations should be pretty easy.

In 2023, our goal is to put together an encrypted Raspberry Pi 4 that syncs to a cloud service, the KTracy.com FTP, and includes a few software packages, including one that generates Sitemap files on a daily basis. If we can generate a daily sitemap on a schedule and synchronize the file folder with the FTP directory for sitemaps.

Our goal with this Raspberry Pi 4 is to set it up once we know what automations we need and be done with it. Plus, with Kevin Tracy preparing for his wedding (see engagement photos), there isn't a lot of time to truly sit down as a team and figure everything out.

What does this mean for SEO?

No matter what, it should be an improvement for our Google SEO. After investigating, Google was still using two broken sitemaps that were generated by WordPress a couple of years ago.

However, we're not sure how complicated KTracy.com is to crawl. By rights, it should be pretty easy with the bulk of our content accessible through the index and archives. However, there are a lot of features on KTracy.com that results in a lot of nooks and crannies that a webcrawler might be too rushed to fully index. By creating sitemaps, we're assuming that KTracy.com currently has a low priority for Google and will not keep bots indexing KTracy.com around for long. Yet, if the site is easy to fully index, then providing an out of date sitemap half the time may actually hurt how often our site is indexed.

Because we plan to eventually automate the sitemap fully, we're content adding a manually loaded sitemap that's sometimes out of date as a placeholder for the fully automated thing in the future.