Optimizing Your Website XML Site Map

Search engine optimization is perhaps one of the most talked about online industries these days. If you’re still learning the ins and outs of SEO, the one thing you shouldn’t leave out is the role of site map SEO.

 

As you may already know, search engines send out spiders (also known as crawlers) that crawl all over our webpages in search of links, content, etc. It’s important to build our websites well so that these spiders can easily recover information from our webpages. Moreover, it’s equally important to develop XML site map optimization. Read on to know why.

Why you Need to Conduct Sitemap SEO

A sitemap is a graphical presentation that lists down the different pages of a website. There are two types of sitemaps: HTML (hyper text markup language) and XML (extensible markup language). An HTML sitemap is a graphical presentation that hierarchically lists down hyperlinks of different pages of a website. It’s primarily designed for humans. By adding an HTML sitemap in your website, visitors can easily navigate your site. Additionally, a sitemap of this sort can help in sitemap SEO because it allows search engine crawlers to easily pick up first-time-missed links.

 

An XML sitemap, on the other hand, is basically a list of the different URLs of a website and is written in a special format. XML site map optimization accelerates search engine indexing because an XML site map informs search spiders about the different URLs of your website. When you have developed XML site map optimization, Google’s crawlers don’t have to visit each page of your website. Instead, they only look at one webpage to see your entire site’s web architecture. Therefore, a website with XML site map optimization would be indexed faster than a website that doesn’t have one. Also, in effect, your website is ranked well because your entire website is thoroughly checked.

The Importance of Having a Google Sitemaps Account

Google actually looks out for us webmasters. They’ve provided ways to simplify our XML site map optimization efforts. In the past, SEO was more of a guessing game. Webmasters had no idea why their sites were removed from the index, for example.

 

That was until Google launched a program called Google Sitemaps. This program can provide valuable data about your site. It reports information including the last time the Googlebot paid a visit to your site, the searches people use to locate your site, and problems in your website that need fixing.

Why Create a Google Sitemap for Your Website

Anyone who has SEO as one of their main priorities should have a Google sitemap. Since Google is the biggest player in the search market, it only makes sense to understand how it scans our sites.

 

Furthermore, once your site is ready to go out into the world, Google can’t guarantee that all your webpages will be seen by the search engine crawlers, which is another reason for having XML site map optimization — so that spiders can “see” your website.

 

Still, it’s quite surprising to find that many webmasters haven’t created a Google sitemap. Technical proficiency is hardly an excuse; getting a Google sitemap is very easy because there are many sitemap generators available on the Web. Google even has its very own sitemap software called, unsurprisingly, the Google Sitemap Generator.

 

To enhance the XML site map optimization process, the Google Sitemap Generator has been improved. It’s now based on Web server filtering, which means that more formats are supported than ever before. Plus, the all new Google sitemap generator is more dynamic and can respond faster to link collecting.

 

While you can find websites upon websites offering sitemap software applications, Google recommends using the Google Sitemap Generator because it produces XML format that can be accepted by several other search engines (like Yahoo and Bing) that are sitemaps.org members.

 

According to Google itself, XML site map optimization specifically helpful for the following reasons:

• Your website contains dynamic content.
• Your website is new and doesn’t have links that point to it. Since the spiders look at the inbound and outbound links during the crawling process, your site may not be scanned if it hardly has links hat lead to it.
• If your website has pages that Googlebot can’t easily discover, e.g. pages with Rich AJAX or images.
• Your site contains a huge archive of webpages that aren’t well-linked to each other, or not linked at all.
• Your site contains webpages that aren’t linked to each other.

 

Overall, sitemap SEO should be something you should integrate into your optimization campaign. Seriously consider making use of the information in this article. With an effective Google sitemap, you will make your website more crawlable, ensuring you greater traffic and ultimately conversion and profit.