Lesson 1: Have an Effective Sitemap

It is recommended that everyone install a sitemap on their domain. You can easily obtain an auto-generated XML sitemap that will stay up-to-date without requiring manual updates.

While having a sitemap is a wise move for SEO purposes, there are additional steps you can take to improve the performance of your stagnant blog. One possible reason why your content is not ranking well on SERPs is that Google and other search engines do not find any value in your posts.

However, they do reward individuals who take corrective action to enhance low-quality posts and transform them into content that meets their standards. We will discuss how you can accomplish this shortly.

One way is to include lastmod in your metadata. This element informs search engines of the last time a particular piece of content was modified. This is crucial because search engines prefer to display fresh content.

It provides them with a fresh opportunity to assess the relevance and comprehensiveness of your new content so that they can present the best possible content to their users. Most people use the W3C datetime format.

This element can also guide Googlebot on how frequently it should crawl and re-index your content. They can determine how frequently you update your content (or how infrequently), and set their schedule accordingly for a new visit.

Unfortunately, this means that you have to update sitemod with the date and time every time you make a change to a post or page.

Recent information from Google and Bing indicates that they may now be ignoring lastmod simply because so many webmasters are doing such a poor job of keeping it up to date.

You are probably better off installing a reliable SEO plugin such as AIOSEO which will generate an XML sitemap, add the date and time whenever a post or page is updated and ping the search engines to let them know.

You can also use GSC (Google Search Console) and Bing Webmaster Tools to queue any updated post or page for a priority reindex.