Do you want to know all about these keywords “What is an XML Site Maps? Why is it Important for your Website?” Well, you will know all about it when you continue reading the article. Now if you are a website owner and you will like to make your website a wonderful one and be known on search engines then you should all means read this article. To get more details then you should read it step by step no skipping, for a better understanding of the article.
What is an XML Sitemaps? Why is it Important for your Website?
So today, I am going to explain what the XML Site Maps are and also why it is important for your website to have one. First, let me begin with what the XML Site Map is. The XML (Extensible Markup Language) Sitemap is a text file used to detail all URLs on a website. Now it can include extra information (metadata) on each URL, with details of when they were last updated. It serves as a roadmap of your website that leads Google to all your important pages. Allows Google to crawl every important page of your website. But sometimes the pages end up without any internal links pointing to them, making then hard to find. What is an XML Site Maps? Why is it Important for your Website?
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XML Sitemap
If you want your website to be found on Google or you want Google to easily know your website then you should make use of the XML sitemap. This sitemap lists a website’s important pages, making sure Google can find and crawl them all. It also, helping it understand your website structure. The ability of an XML sitemap to assist crawlers in faster indexation is especially important for websites that:
- Frequently add new pages.
- Frequently change content of existing pages.
- Have thousands of pages and\or a deep website architecture.
- Suffer from weak internal linking and orphan pages.
- Lack a strong external link profile.
Note: you must note that when submitting a sitemap with noindex URLs can also speed up deindexation. This can be more efficient than removing URLs in Google Search Console if you have many to be deindexed. But make sure to use this with care and be sure you only add such URLs temporarily to your sitemaps.
XML Sitemap Format
There are different XML sitemap formats and I want to tell you these formats, just read below:
- Loc (a.k.a. Location) Tag.
- Lastmod (a.k.a. Last Modified) Tag.
- Changefreq (a.k.a. Change Frequency) Tag.
- Priority Tag.
Loc (a.k.a. Location) Tag
Now, this is a compulsory tag it contains an absolute, canonical version of the URL location. It should accurately reflect your site protocol (http or https) and if you have chosen to include or exclude www. For international websites, this is also where you can implement your hreflang handling.
Lastmod (a.k.a. Last Modified) Tag
Now this is optional but highly recommended tag used to communication the file’s last modified date and time. John Mueller acknowledged that Google does use the lastmod metadata to understand when the page last changed and if it should be crawled. Contradicting advice from Illyes in 2015.
Changefreq (a.k.a. Change Frequency) Tag
In case you don’t know, once upon a time, this optional tag hinted frequently content on the URL was expected to change to search engines. But Mueller has stated that “change frequency doesn’t really play that much of a role with sitemaps” and also that “it is much better to just specify the time stamp directly”.
Priority Tag
Now this optional tag that ostensibly tells search engines how important a page is relative to your other URLs on a scale between 0.0 to 1.0. Also, at best, it was only ever a hint to search engines and both Mueller and Illyes have clearly stated they ignore it.
Types of Sitemaps
Now there are some types of sitemaps, here are they listed below:
- XML Sitemap Index.
- XML Image Sitemap.
- XML Video Sitemap.
- Google News Sitemap.
- Mobile Sitemap.
- HTML Sitemap.
- Dynamic XML Sitemap.
These are the types of Sitemaps available.
Why is XML Sitemap Important?
Now the XML sitemap is very important, because it is good for SEO, as they allow Google to easily or quickly find your essential website pages. Even if your internal linking isn’t perfect, it still helps you to make your web pages found. XML sitemaps are important for SEO because they make it easier for Google to find your site’s pages this is important because Google ranks web pages, not just websites.
Now there is no downside of having an XML sitemap and having one can improve your SEO, so we highly recommend them. The sitemap also carries information about each page, including when it was created and last modified, and its importance relative to other pages on your site. Now, this speeds up the process of indexing pages.
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