Sitemaps and its Effects on SEO

1. What is a Sitemap?
In simple terms, a Sitemap is an XML file that is full of your individual webpage’s URLs. It’s like an archive of every webpage in your website. This file should be easily discoverable in your site in order for search engine crawlers to stumble upon it.


2. What is a Sitemap for?
google Sitemap spiderA Sitemap is usually used for the purpose of letting the search engine crawlers follow the links to all your individual webpages so that it won’t miss out on anything.
Sometimes we leave out URLs or hide them from all visible pages because we don’t exactly want some of the users to go there. As a result, some of these URLs are uncrawlable to search engine spiders.
We can still leave those URLs hidden from some users without having to lose out on those pages not being crawled by search engine spiders through including them in an XML Sitemap.

 3. How does your Sitemap affect your SEO?
Search engines should see all the pages that you want them to see. The more pages that they index from you, the more trust your site gains. It only means that your website has more information to offer.
Making sure the search engine spiders get to crawl all the stuff they need to crawl from your website is the exact purpose of a Sitemap. It’s not for navigation, it’s not for internal linking. It’s for the search engine spiders.

4. What are Different Types of Sitemaps?
There are principally two types of sitemaps
  • HTML sitemap (written in Hypertext Markup Language)
  • XML sitemap (written in Extensible Markup Language)
XML Sitemaps can have two types.
  • Index Sitemap (how many URL sitemaps a website have)
  • URL Sitemap (contain final information of URLs on webpage)
XML sitemaps are further divided into 3 different categories.
  • Sitemaps for webpages (commonly known as xml sitemap in community)
  • Image sitemaps (details of images and their URLs on website)
  • Video sitemaps (what webpages have videos embedded in them and their details)
So, final tree of sitemaps categorization we have is;
    
XML Sitemap
  •  Index Sitemap
  •  URL Sitemap
  •  Sitemaps for Webpages
  •  Sitemaps for Images
  •  Sitemaps for videos
      HTML Sitemaps

5. What is an HTML Sitemap?
HTML sitemap, as stated above, is a map that contains information about website resources and their location. These sitemaps are primarily for users to assist them to find their desired item on website or to explore a website easily. Let’s take an example:
A website has thousands of webpage categorized in different sections in form of directories. Now with this massive quantity of webpages user can feel himself at nowhere when he lands on such website. The first thing that can assist him is search option. But if he has no luck then HTML sitemap is the last resort for him where he can explore the website.
Secondly, as HTML sitemap links the resources internally and internal links help in improving keyword rankings; these sitemaps also help linked webpages in their rankings with search engines.

6. What do We Write in XML Sitemap?
We write information about objects like its location of availability, importance, type of object, how frequently it gets change etc.

7. Why should you get a XML sitemap
Like we said, having an efficient XML sitemap can improve your rankings. But this is particularly useful when:
·         You have a website with a complicated structure or many internal links
·         Your site is a new one or if you have just a few external links
·         Your site is consistent and have archived content
·         Your website has dynamic pages (mainly occurs for e-commerce website).

Benefits of having a XML sitemap
Having a sitemap on your site passes more data to search engines. So it also:
·         Lists all URLs from your site. And this includes pages that would not have been foundable by search engines
·         Gives engines page priority and thus crawl priority. You can add a tag on your XML sitemap saying which pages are the most important. Bots will thus first focus on this priority pages.
·         Gives temporal information. You can also include two other optional tags that will pass extra data to search engines to help them crawl your website. The first one, “lastmod’ informs them when a page last changed. The second one, “changefreq” tells how often a page is likely to change.
·         Gives you information back from the Google Webmaster Central. You can access googlebot activity for instance.


Comments

  1. Unknown26 June 2018 at 03:49

    Hello,
    Thank you for sharing such useful and informative article. I’m just starting my career in Blogging, and SEO Protocol helped me every time. Actually this my first comment when I learnt blog commenting form here.
    Thank you!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Unknown27 June 2018 at 03:18

    Thank you for this informative blog. It is very useful for us and we will be sharing this on our social media feeds.

    ReplyDelete

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