Beginning with the question of “What is an XML Sitemap?” The answer goes like this, an XML sitemap is precisely a road map of an entire company website that evidently informs Google and other major search engines about the important pages of a site that are available for crawling.
Every website desires to be acknowledged by the search engines and an XML sitemap is a wonderful way to lead search engines to the website by listing your pages along with their URLs.
Websites in need of XML Sitemap
Even though every website is in need of an XML sitemap, they are particularly essential when:
- Your website is too large and complex with lots of archived contents that are not properly linked.
- Your website is rather new and does not include many external links.
- Your website is not well-structured.
- Your website contains many dynamic pages like in e-commerce websites.
Benefits of Using XML Sitemap
All websites that make use of XML Sitemaps get innate benefits like:
- Fast Indexing: As mentioned before, an XML sitemap guides search engines to your website. When the sitemap of your website is submitted in Google Search Console, your pages get indexed much faster and rank higher in Search Engine Results Page (SERP).
- Prioritize Crucial Pages: Upon creating a sitemap, you can add tags to certain pages as the most important ones. As a result of which, bots will crawl over the pages and prioritise the important ones.
- Automatic Notification of Updates: Frequent updates of contents are necessary for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and without an XML Sitemap it could take a while before Google indexes the newly updated content. But with XML sitemap, automatic notifications will be sent to Google on any new contents added or modifications of pre-existing content.
How to set an XML Sitemap?
In order to create an XML Sitemap make use of the automatic sitemap creation features of website content management systems.
Make sure that the format is correct and acceptable by the search engines. For example, Google always prefers Sitemap Protocol 0.9 and all XML Sitemaps must adhere to this standard protocol to be accepted.
After the creation of the sitemap and uploading it to your web server, you must verify it with the search engines on their respective tools such as Google Webmaster Tool of Google Chrome.
All this information can be better explained and executed by the best digital marketing company in India, offering proper guidance about everything related to marketing in digital media.
