Another Search 101 blog for you here and this one is about XML Sitemaps - pretty obvious from the title!
XML Sitemaps are very important to the ranking of your website. The essential role of an XML Sitemap is to tell Google about pages on your site which may not otherwise be found by the Search Engine. An XML Sitemap is a list of your website’s pages which is submitted to Google for indexing.
XML Sitemap
This can be helpful when Google is crawling your website, sometimes there can be cases where, unless specifically told, Google would not be able to find some of your web pages. This can be the case if you have:
- Dynamically generated content.
- Your site is new and has few links to it.
- Your site has pages that aren’t easily discovered by Googlebot during the crawl process – for exampls, pages featuring rich AJAX or images.
- Your site has a large archive of content pages that are not well linked to each other, or are not linked at all.
Your XML Sitemap can also be used to notify Google of more specific details about your pages i.e. the date it was last updated, how often you expect the page to change. You can even specify specific Sitemaps for images or videos giving subject, licencing and type information.
XML Sitemaps allow Google to provide your site with a better crawling schedule, to understand your site’s stucture more clearly, and to crawl your site more thoroughly. So, what are you waiting for, in terms of search an XML Sitemap is a must have! Please feel free to contact us here at a451 if you need help or have any questions.
