When you are unsure of the directions to a place, I guess your best bet is to search for a specific place on the map and learn how to get there using navigation. The same is true for search engine bots, So if you want your content to be searched, crawled, and indexed, having a sitemap file on your website can be beneficial.

You've certainly heard of the term image sitemap, even if you're distantly related to SEO or web development. I brought together the known and little-known topics within the scope of sitemap and discussed the subject of Sitemap, aka "Sitemap," for you. I hope you like my article where I mentioned what are the best practices and what mistakes are made.

First of all, I would like to state that I paid attention to the fact that this article is a guide in order to answer many of your questions. I have written my research and experiences with this in mind.

What is an image sitemap?

Sitemap consists of pages created specifically for search engine bots and browsers for a better understanding of websites and indexing of pages. Sitemap, in other words, is a structured list of pages that you want search engine bots to crawl and index on your website.

Image sitemaps are XML files that contain images on websites. It helps search engines discover the images on the site. The increase in the variety of methods that users use to reach the information they are looking for causes the optimization criteria of search engines to differ even more. Visual searches and voice search methods, which have been popular lately, are one of them. Undoubtedly, the increase in image searches has created new needs for websites. At the beginning of these needs is the need to create an image sitemap.

It was already known that websites should optimize the images they use with alt and title arrangements. However, with the new trend, visual site maps have started to be created, and it has become possible to stand out in visual searches with these maps. That's why creating an image sitemap has been added to the SEO to-do list.

What does an Image Sitemap do?

Creating visual sitemaps for the images on your websites allows the content on your site to come out more easily in image searches, and thus your images will earn you traffic.

Thanks to the visual sitemap, your product images, blog images, and news images, In short, all your images can earn you traffic. Before these operations, you should not forget to edit your alt and title while adding images. In addition, image sitemaps make it more accessible and provide more efficient results, especially for images created with Javascript, which Google cannot find.

How to Create a Google Image Sitemap?

Multiple methods can be used to create image sitemaps. With these methods, you can automatically or manually create an image sitemap.

Creating a Visual Sitemap with the Plugin

Image sitemap creation with Screaming Frog

Manually create an Image sitemap

Creating an Image Sitemap with the Plugin

Plugin usage is vital for WordPress sites and provides great convenience. Among such plugins is the "Google XML Sitemap for Images" plugin. Although this plugin is not directly accessible in the library, it can be found with a little research. With this plugin, which is very simple to use, you can create a visual sitemap in just seconds and submit it to search engines. Plugin link for image sitemap generator online free: https://wordpress.org/plugins/google-image-sitemap/

Best WordPress Sitemap Plugins

As I mentioned above, using sitemap plugins will make your job much easier. As a matter of fact, if you are using a WordPress-based site, I can say that your job is much easier. Most of the SEO plugins you have probably used before support sitemap generation. In this direction, you can use the following add-ons:

Yoast SEO (It is a plugin that I have never used and cannot warm up.)

All in One SEO Pack (This is the Plugin I've Used for a Long Time.)

Google XML Sitemaps

Rank Math SEO (My choice after April 2021.)

Generating Manual Sitemaps

   In this method, which is another alternative, you have to constantly deal with the tags I have given you above. This method is hardly used at all. Since everything is automated in today's technology, everyone prefers automatic image sitemap applications.

Image Sitemap Example

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"

        xmlns:image="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-image/1.1">

  <url>

    <loc>http://example.com/sample.html</loc>

    <image: image>

      <image:loc>http://example.com/image.jpg</image:loc>

    </image: image>

    <image: image>

      <image:loc>http://example.com/photo.jpg</image:loc>

    </image: image>

  </url> 

</urlset> 

If you write your own domain name instead of the example in the example I gave above and the path of the image you uploaded to your server instead of photo/image, you will have created your sitemap manually.

Creating a Visual Sitemap with the ScreamingFrog SEO Tool

The Screamingfrog SEO tool is known and used by many people engaged in optimization. Among other advantages of this tool, it also has features for creating visual sitemaps.

You can download the ScreamingFrog SEO tool completely free of charge from its website. After downloading the tool and completing its installation, you can create your sitemap by following these steps:

Go to the Scan section and enter the URL of the website you want to create a sitemap for, and start the scanning process. We need to wait until the scanning process is complete.

After the scanning process is finished, we come to the "Sitemap" section in the Screamfrog menu. After this section, we click on the "Create Sitemap" field that appears.

We can create our sitemap settings from the settings section that will appear after selecting the "Sitemap"> "Image Sitemap" stages. Our advice here would be to leave the settings as default and not change them.

That's all you need to do to create visual sitemaps with Screamingfrog. But you should not forget to index your sitemap. You can use FTP or CPanel.

Things to Consider While Creating a Sitemap

Although it is an extremely simple process, there are some points that you should pay attention to when creating a sitemap. Because there are various limitations that sitemap files must comply with. In addition, the pages that should be excluded from the crawl should not be included in the site map. In this regard, it is possible to list the main points that you should pay attention to as follows:

First, let me remind you that sitemap files should not contain more than 50,000 URL addresses. In the maps you create for images, this number drops to 1000.

Besides, the size of a sitemap file should be at most 50 MB.

Many pages that help users are unnecessary in terms of crawl budget. For example, you should not add features such as landing pages, wish lists, etc., to the sitemap.

You should note that the URL addresses you add to the sitemap do not give an error code. Otherwise, you are guaranteed to crawl pages that will waste your browsing budget.

Similarly, duplicate sites waste your crawl budget. You should also exclude them from the sitemap.

Adding the pages you have blocked via robots.txt to the sitemap will be helpful.

You should not forget to encode your files as UTF 8.

If your site contains multiple languages, you should use separate URL addresses for each language on the same pages. You should also make use of hreflang annotations.

Turkish characters are not included in URL addresses. Therefore, you should not use these characters in the sitemap either.

How to find an image sitemap on the website?

Now that you know all about sitemaps, we can move on to advice on how sitemaps should be found on websites:

You can propose crawling a list of pages in an XML sitemap. Therefore, you don't have to include the sitemap with every page on your website. Include in your sitemap the pages and articles that are crucial to your website. These are the pages that are more likely to drive organic traffic to your website and feature high-quality content.

Delete duplicate content-containing pages.

Discard any pages with subpar material. You shouldn't submit low-quality index pages while optimizing a website for search engines. 

It's not how many pages you have in the index but how many 'good' pages you have in the index.

Categorize your sitemaps.

Create separate sitemaps for images, videos, and news.

Include URLs that only Google can access. If you have pages blocked by robots or behind a password-protected area, do not include them in the sitemap.

Make sure your XML sitemap includes the 'last modified time' field, a value that tells Google when a page was last modified.This is helpful when you want Google to re-index a few of your website's pages.

Above I have discussed with you what a sitemap is, what it does, how to create it, etc. We shared a lot of things you might wonder about sitemaps.