Creating a well-structured sitemap is crucial for a website’s SEO success. A sitemap helps search engines like Google understand the structure of your site, enabling better indexing and visibility. If you are using CodeIgniter as your framework, this guide will walk you through the process of creating an SEO-friendly sitemap.
An SEO-friendly sitemap provides search engines with a blueprint of your website's structure. This can lead to improved indexing, increased crawl efficiency, and ultimately, higher rankings on search engine results pages (SERPs).
Before you begin, ensure that your CodeIgniter environment is properly set up. This includes having index.php removed from URLs for better SEO.
class Sitemap extends CI_Controller {
public function index() {
header("Content-Type: text/xml;charset=iso-8859-1");
$this->load->model('sitemap_model');
$data['urls'] = $this->sitemap_model->get_urls();
$this->load->view('sitemap_view', $data);
}
}
class Sitemap_model extends CI_Model {
public function get_urls() {
$urls = array(
base_url(),
base_url('about'),
base_url('contact')
);
return $urls;
}
}
echo '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>';
echo '<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">';
foreach ($urls as $url) {
echo '<url>';
echo '<loc>' . htmlspecialchars($url) . '</loc>';
echo '</url>';
}
echo '</urlset>';
After creating your sitemap, test it by navigating to yourdomain.com/sitemap. Ensure that all URLs are displayed correctly in XML format.
Incorporating a sitemap is just one part of the larger SEO puzzle. Consider enhancing your site’s SEO further by checking out these resources on adding a CodeIgniter SEO plugin and another CodeIgniter SEO plugin.
For more information and discussions, join the community at CodeIgniter SEO forum.
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