What Is a XML Sitemap and How Can You Use It for Your SEO?
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Web search tools depend on bots called crawlers to go out into the World Wide Web to find pages on the web. While they're quick at doing this, it can take a long time before they track down a specific page on your site, because of the sheer measure of content accessible on the web. This is the place where a XML sitemap proves to be useful! A XML sitemap is a document on your site that tells internet searcher crawlers what you need them to take a gander at on your website. It looks something like this:
There are three required parts of the sitemap. The first is <urlset>, which contains every one of the URLs in a sitemap. The following required part is the <url> tag, which is the holder for all of the data connected with individual URLs. Presently we get to the singular URL data.
Inside the URL tag is the area tag (<loc>) which is the place where you'll put the URL you need to guide crawlers to. Different components aren't needed via web crawlers however are still exceptionally accommodating. The last alteration tag (<lastmod>) lets you know when a record was last changed. The change recurrence tag (<changefreq>) says how regularly you update your pages, and the need tag (<priority>) lets crawlers know which pages are more significant on your site. Here is an illustration of a sitemap from food storage and garbage sack organization GLAD.
What is a sitemap and how does it affect SEO?
A sitemap is a blueprint of your website. It’s a file containing information about the pages, videos and other files on your website and the relationships between them.
Sitemaps can have a positive effect on your SEO. While we’re focusing on XML sitemaps right now, HTML sitemaps are a very helpful SEO tool. You can usually find a link to the HTML sitemap in the footer of a website.
How do you create an XML sitemap for your website?
When creating an XML sitemap, you’ll want to include links to all the pages you want search bots to crawl. If you don’t want a page crawled, you should not put it in your XML sitemap. However, that won’t stop a search engine crawler from finding it.
You should include the pages you don’t want crawled in your robots.txt file. Check out our blog post about robots.txt after this video if you want to learn more. A great tool for generating a sitemap for your website is XML-Sitemaps.com. If your website is 500 pages or less, you can use this tool for free.
