Some of the most important eCommerce sitemap guidelines are the following:
Notice that you can either let your CMS create a sitemap for you (e.g. WordPress or Wix can generate them automatically), use a special generator (like Magento 2 Google) to do it for you (if you have more than a couple of dozen URLs) or create it manually.
Some of the best practices to increase the effectiveness of your sitemap include:
Extensions are an added structure for certain media types within a sitemap that is hard to parse. Here are some eCommerce sitemap examples of such add-ons:
It’s not obligatory, as, in case you have a proper navigation hierarchy and correct links, search engine crawlers can discover your pages and index them without a sitemap. However, in certain cases, Google and other search engines recommend building it as it can help to better discover websites with many pages, and it can also help an eCommerce site that has many product pages that are connected by only a few links.
It’s not mandatory to submit it to Google, however, it’s recommended by Google to submit it to Google Search Console to enhance the crawl ability rate of your website.
You might need a generator for your eCommerce store for creating your sitemap. After that, such extensions as Video, Image, or Google News add-ons might be built on for better crawling of these media types.