SEO tip #7: What is a sitemap and why is important for your SEO efforts

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So, what is a sitemap?

Basically, it’s a document used to describe the navigational structure of your website. It’s a hierarchical map of your website which shows the connections between web pages, web page trees and website content. They have a double purpose: to help your visitors to easily find their way through your site and to help the search engines to do the best job possible when reading and indexing the content of your website. Obviously, the structure and the format of a sitemap file will vary depending on its intended use.

Those dedicated to humans – the HTML sitemaps – are regular web pages used as additional navigation aids. It could be a good idea to place a “Sitemap” link somewhere on the main page – usually in the footer section – in order to enhance the user experience. Evidently, the actual styling or formatting will vary depending on the designer’s tastes, but the goal is always the same: to provide a clear understanding of page content locations within the website.

Those dedicated to search engines and optimized for computer reading will typically take the form of an XML document, which basically, it’s a structured list of information enclosed in standardized tags forming an outline of key and value pairs. These can be search engine sitemaps, news sitemaps, RSS feeds, XML media sitemaps, etc. Needless to say, your XML sitemap must contain only pages that are actually there on your website and all the pages you want indexed must be included in the sitemap.

While you are trying to make a successful SEO for a WordPress website these sitemaps are especially important and useful if:

  • your site has a large archive of content pages

  • your site is relatively new and has few inbound links that can or could lead the crawlers to your website

  • your website has any type of dynamically created content

  • you have pages with images, frames, Flash elements, rich AJAX, etc or other content types that can’t be interpreted by spiders

  • you want to inform search engines immediately about recently updated pages or any other changes made on your site

  • you have a lot of – older – content with potential broken links or orphaned pages

  • you are focusing on a very broad and segmented topic that must be efficiently classified

These XML sitemaps (often called “Google sitemaps”) will contain a lot more – optional, yet very useful – information for the search engines than the traditional HTML sitemaps, such as:

  • priority; you can give a weight to your pages relative to each other; the idea is quite straightforward: to give a higher priority to your index page, your review pages, testimonial pages, etc that you really want to see in the search engine results; it won’t affect your overall rankings, but at least your TOS page won’t outperform your product pages in the search engine listings

  • frequency; it’s always a good idea to tell search engines how frequently your site is likely to change; while your “Contact” page probably won’t change regularly, your blog content might change every day; these “suggestions” will help search engines to re-index your website more efficiently

  • last modified; another useful option is to tell search engines when your site was last modified; it’s an important factor, because if your site hasn’t changed, the search engine may not bother to crawl it again; on the other hand, search engines have their own ways to determine whether a site has been modified, so if you are updating your sitemap using time-consuming manual methods probably it’s better to forget this option



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Recent Comments

43

Thank you but it is necessary to do this to get better ranking How is the easiest way to do it?

To do what Felix?

Do you have any SEO plugin installed? AIO SEO or Yoast for example?

Check this out

Yes Felix.

Having a sitemap is a must.

Trust me, is painless :)

You submit your sitemap to your Google Console so that Google can crawl your site and rank your articles and your website in general.
All-In-One-Generates its own sitemap and you then take that sitemap and submit it.
Robert-A

Unless you submit a sitemap it will just be potluck that anyone finds your site.

Google will rank your site according to your content and keywords.
Its those keywords that will be matching peoples search terms and they will land on the Search Results Pages and hopefully your site will be among those results.

No probs and happy to help when I can.
Enjoy your Monday.
Robert

Onwards and Upwards.
Robert

Thank you for the information.
Justin

Thanks for your time Justin!

Thanks for sharing.

What can I say :)

Thanks for reading!

I say, no problem. Lol.

I knew that you'll say that :) LOL

Thanks for the information Zed.

Derek

Thanks for your time Derek!

Wow, I am so impress. I guess that is one of the loophole in my site. I am totally out of control in my site. Too many to learn in word press. Sometimes makes me discourages. What did I click wrong. It is happened sometimes that I was fall asleep an d I would say I click something wrong.

I really need to read and understand and follow the step by step guide.

Hi Nila

Don't be hard on yourself! Everything is hard before it's easy ...

As you said: step by step

I am in an affiliate before 4 years ago. It is also word press. The things is that time I never buy a domain. :) I only bought the software that not last. In just 4 months the affiliate company is gone. No support at all. A lot of people going crazy. They trying to asked their money back. I didn't! But it is a pain to know losing of money for nothing. Here in WA the members itself like me. It's up to us not to learn, read, understand and follow the technique.

Regards,

Nila

Thanks Nila

Hi Zsolt,
I always amazed with your detailed knowledge in SEO. You are the SEO guy!. Very interesting! .

Maybe you can enlighten me on the following:

1) You mentioned about giving priorities to your various pages. Can I do it individually or I have to set it at 'type of post' level? e.g. posts / pages / portfolio etc. I am using Yoast plugin, would that setting is possible with this plugin.

2) For last modified content; let say I just updated a post with some additional content, should I update the 'date of published' as at the date I modified the post or should I leave as it's original.

Thanks for posting this important piece.

:)Joe

Hi Joe,

Yep, I really like SEO ... But I assure you, I've paid my fees :)

So ...

1. The truth is that the optional priority fields are quite irrelevant in these days. Two-three years ago those Google guys said that they don’t use them on most sites ... And as a result, the optional priority variables have been removed from the Yoast sitemaps ...

2. I wouldn't change the original date. Google doesn't like that. Many people will say that won't affect your SEO, but I have a different opinion. Why? Because, the date listed in your SERP meta description won’t inherently impact your freshness. Yes, it could be a temporary shortcut to higher CTRs. According to my experience, while you might get away with changing a date a few times, there could certainly be consequences down the road. I'd suggest to simply re-submit the given URL in Google Search Console.

1) Noted. So I may leave this as it is.

2) Resubmitting the url makes a lot sense. Thanks for the answer.

Thanks Zsolt.

Appreciated.


:)Joe

My pleasure Joe!

submitting my Sitemap is my autopilot for Google Search console and Bing webmaster. Set it and forget it.

Thanks for your valuable input

This is an extremely informative and detail post, thank you!

Thanks for your time James!

Thank you Zsolt. Jim

Thank YOU Jim!

Awesomezep!

Thanksfleeky!

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