Introduction
Ever heard of sitemaps or their use? Sitemaps, when used correctly, can be a great way to grab the attention of search engines and drive more organic traffic to your website. Like you need a map to go in the right direction, search engines use sitemaps to find and present the relevant content as per the user requirements. Many experts also believe that following sitemap best practices can improve the SEO of any website.
In this blog, we will understand more about sitemaps and learn about the sitemap best practices from the following topics:
- What are sitemaps?
- Why do you need a sitemap?
- SEO sitemap best practices that you should follow
- Advantages of using sitemap best practices
What are Sitemaps?
Someone new to SEO tools may wonder what a sitemap is and what it is used for. In simple terms, a sitemap is a map or an XML list describing your website and its different pages. It is a file that contains all the information about your website, such as videos, pictures, pages, etc. This sitemap is useful for search engines to identify which files and pages are important to crawl your website.
Moreover, site maps provide important information to search engines, like how often you make changes, the last time you updated your web page, the type of content available, etc. Using sitemaps, search engines can identify its running time, genre, appropriateness, license, etc.
Using sitemap best practices will help search engines understand your content better and increase the ranking of your website in the SERPS. It is also beneficial for the users as they will get access to the most relevant content as per their search.
Why Do You Need a Sitemap?
Even though search engines are capable of finding web pages without a sitemap, using them can improve your chances at times when search engines slow down. Using sitemaps will further speed up the crawling process of the search engines to find your website.
Let us understand how using sitemaps can be beneficial in the following different scenarios:
While Adding a New Content
Site maps can be most useful to direct search engines to new websites that don’t have any or a few links. You can also use them while adding new pages to your existing website to enhance their visibility in the search engine.
When Sites Have Multiple Versions
For example, there is a particular website that heaters audiences of different geographical locations and languages. In such cases, using sitemaps will help search engines display the most relevant content as per the language or location of the user.
To Get More Intelligent Crawling
You can use sitemaps to get more intelligent crawling to your website from search engines. Using sitemaps increases your website’s priority level to other less significant sites in the search engine.
SEO Sitemap Best Practices That You Should Follow
Experts recommend many SEO sitemap best practices that one can follow to improve the SEO of any web page. Some of them are:
Prioritize Your Web Pages
One of the most important sitemap practices is that you should prioritize your web pages properly. While creating a sitemap, one needs to rank their web pages between the score of 0.1 and 1. Search engines will crawl those web pages that have a higher score in comparison to those with a low score. Therefore, you must assign higher scores to those web pages whose content you update more frequently.
Restrict URLs for Each Sitemap
For instance, if you have a medium or large-sized website, then you have to create different site maps for each category, as all links won’t fit into a single sitemap. Doing this will keep each sitemap organized and will prevent any possible chaos.
Search engines prohibit multiple links in a site map as they consider it a form of spamming. You can limit the URLs by using canonical versions in your sitemap, and if you have multiple URLs, then use only the main page URL in your sitemap.
Use Dynamic Sitemaps for Large Websites
It is best to use dynamic sitemaps for larger websites that have multiple pages where the content needs to be added or updated frequently. Dynamic sitemaps update themselves automatically when you add more pages to an existing website. In addition, dynamic sitemaps provide faster and more convenient access to search engines to crawl websites.
Use Sitemaps on the Homepage and Root Directory
Placement of sitemaps in the right places becomes very important to provide users with easy access to the information on your website. This will help users easily find what they are looking for by eliminating the need to check multiple categories individually.
Submit the Sitemap to Google
You can create a site map by using a sitemap generator tool for a much faster and easier way than creating it manually. You can use the Yoast plugin if you have a WordPress website. For other websites, use Google XML sitemaps. After creating a site map, the next step is to submit it to Google. Remember to repeat this step if you add some new pages.
Advantages of Using Sitemap Best Practices
Following is the list of some of the advantages of using sitemap best practices:
Inform Search Engines
When you update or add new pages to your website, a sitemap will help search engines crawl to these newly added pages. This will help in improving the visibility of your website in the search engine.
Highlight the Website’s Purpose
You can highlight the website’s purpose by including relevant and unique keywords on the sitemap. This will help in providing higher value to your website’s content in the search engine.
Increases Visibility
Search engines may not go through the index of every web page. Thus, using sitemaps becomes more important. Sitemaps help search engines navigate to your website by providing all the necessary information.
Organize Web Pages
Using sitemaps is essential for large websites to keep your content in a more organized and effective way.
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Conclusion
Sitemaps are a great way to grab the attention of SERPS and drive more organic traffic to your website. Search engines use this sitemap to identify which files and pages are important and present the relevant content as per the user’s requirements. To avail the multiple benefits a sitemap offers, follow the sitemap best practices mentioned in the article and improve the SEO of your website.
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