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Sitemap Setup

A sitemap helps search engines discover and index all the pages on your website efficiently. This guide explains how to set up a sitemap for your eDemand web application.

Configuring Your Domain for Sitemap​

  1. Open the .env file in your project's root directory
  2. Add your web domain or subdomain URL to the appropriate variable

Add Web URL

Generating the Sitemap​

Choose one of the following options based on your hosting setup.

1) Shared hosting without SEO (static export)​

  • Build your site (this creates the out folder):
npm run export
  • During the build, the sitemap will be generated and saved to the public directory.
  • Deploy the contents of the out folder to your hosting. Ensure the generated sitemap is included.

2) VPS (build on server; auto-generate sitemap)​

  • Build the project on your VPS. During the build, the sitemap is generated automatically and added to the public folder.

Example:

npm run build
  • After the build, verify the file exists at public/sitemap.xml.

3) Generate manually (only sitemap)​

  • Run the sitemap generation script:
npm run generat-sitemap
  • This will generate/update public/sitemap.xml without starting the app.

Customizing the Sitemap​

If you want to customize the sitemap manually:

  1. Navigate to the public directory
  2. Open the sitemap.xml file
  3. Modify the file according to your needs

Sitemap Structure​

A typical sitemap follows this XML structure:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  <url>
    <loc>https://yourdomain.com/</loc>
    <lastmod>2023-04-01</lastmod>
    <changefreq>daily</changefreq>
    <priority>1.0</priority>
  </url>
  <url>
    <loc>https://yourdomain.com/properties</loc>
    <lastmod>2023-04-01</lastmod>
    <changefreq>daily</changefreq>
    <priority>0.8</priority>
  </url>
  <!-- Additional URLs -->
</urlset>

Submitting Your Sitemap to Search Engines​

After creating your sitemap:

  1. Deploy your website with the sitemap.xml file
  2. Submit your sitemap URL to search engines through their webmaster tools:

Best Practices​

For an effective sitemap:

  • Keep it up to date with your latest content
  • Include all important pages you want indexed
  • Set appropriate priority and change frequency values
  • Keep the file size under 50MB and fewer than 50,000 URLs (create multiple sitemaps if needed)
  • Make sure the URLs in your sitemap actually exist and return 200 status codes