When it comes to improving your ranking, an XML sitemap can be a very good partner. This protocol helps Google and the other major search engines to easily understand and explore the structure of your website. It was first introduced by Google in 2005, with MSN and Yahoo offering support for the protocol a year later. Sitemaps are known as URL inclusion protocols because they advise search engines on what to analyze. It is opposed to robots.txt files which are an exclusion protocol because it tells the search engines what not to explore.
The Blue Corona website has made a good comparison between an XML sitemap and a plan for a house.
In other words, an XML sitemap will make it easier for Google to find your pages when it crawls your website, because all of your pages can be classified, not just your website as a domain. It informs the search engines of the pages of their sites available for exploration. Although the absence of an XML sitemap is not penalized, the creation of your own is highly recommended because it can improve your SEO.
Why should you get an XML sitemap
As we said, having an effective XML sitemap can improve your ranking. But this is particularly useful when:
- You have a website with a complex structure or many internal links
- Your site is new or if you only have a few external links
- Your site is consistent and contains archived content
- Your website has dynamic pages (occurs mainly for the ecommerce website).
Benefits of Having an XML Site Map
Having a sitemap on your site transmits more data to the search engines. So that too:
- Lists all of your site’s URLs. And that includes pages that couldn’t be found by the search engines
- Give priority to the engine page and therefore priority to exploration. You can add a tag to your XML sitemap indicating the most important pages. The bots will therefore focus first on these priority pages.
- Gives time information. You can also include two other optional tags that will pass additional data to search engines to help them crawl your website. The first, “lastmod”, informs them of the last modification of a page. The second, “changefreq” indicates how often a page is likely to change.
- Gives you information from Google Webmaster Central. You can access Googlebot activity for example.
How to configure your XML sitemap
Creating your XML sitemap can be quite easy since many website content management systems offer the ability to automatically create your own. But if you are using this solution, make sure the output is in the correct format and error free. For Google, the required protocol is the Sitemap Protocol 0.9. Your site map should:
- Start with an opening tag and finish with a closing tag.
- Specify the namespace (protocol standard) in the tag.
- Include an entry for each URL, as a parent XML tag.
- Include a child entry for each parent tag.
- And use UTF-8 encoding
Next, you need to check your XML sitemap with Google Webmaster Tool to make sure it is in the right format and correctly uploaded to your web server.
For small websites whose content is not downloaded as often, you can use the XML sitemap generator. It allows you to define how often your pages are updated and the modification date used. Once the generator has created your sitemap, you need to download it to the root of your domain, for example www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml.
However, this tool is limited in many ways. You can only add five hundred pages, this defines the same “frequency of change” for all URLs and is obviously not suitable for a website that publishes content every week, because you want your home page to be more frequent explored than the other pages.
If you are under WordPress and you already use the WordPress SEO plugin from Yoast, keep it to create your sitemap because it is deadly simple. The Elegantthemes website has published a nice guide to setting up your sitemap with WordPress.
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