XML Sitemaps Improve Site’s Visibility In Search Engines

Hello there! If you are new here, you might want to subscribe to the RSS feed for updates on this topic.

I have seen many websites and blogs do not have XML Sitemaps properly in place. It is a good technique to improve site’s visibility in search engines.

XML Sitemap (upper-case) and sitemap (lower-case) are 2 different things. Do not confuse by their names which are very similar to each others. In this article, I am focusing on XML Sitemap and how you can improve your blog by taking advantage of it. I will talk about sitemap in details in my next blog post.

What Is XML Sitemap?

So what are XML Sitemap and how can we make sure of them?

XML Sitemap is a Sitemap in XML file format that lists URLs for a website along with additional metadata about each URL such as when it was last updated, how often it usually changes and how important it is relative to other URLs in the same website. It has wide adoption and is supported by major search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft Live.

It is probably the easiest way for webmasters to inform search engines about web pages on their sites that are available for crawling and indexing. Normally search engine crawlers discover web pages by following links in web pages that exist in their database. XML Sitemaps provide supplementary data by allowing crawlers to pick up all URLs in the XML Sitemap file and their associated metadata.

There are 2 particular metadata I am interested. The first one is last updated date. It tells search engines when it was last updated for this particular web page. The purpose is to avoid crawlers recrawling web page that has not changed. Search engines like new and updated content and they give priority to the fresh content in search results. If possible, you should try to update your web page regularly.

The second field that make me interested is change frequency. This value indicates how frequently the content at a particular URL is likely to change. It helps search engines to schedule their crawlers to come back to your web page.

Implementing XML Sitemap does not guarantee that web pages are indexed in search engines but it provides hints to tell Google which version of a URL you would prefer as the canonical one (e.g. http://yourdomain.com or http://www.yourdomain.com).

What Should I Do?

#1 Generating XML Sitemap

First step is to generate XML Sitemap for your website. If you are not using WordPress blog, you can go to XML Sitemaps Generator. It has a free online version and a paid full version.

If you are using WordPress blog, then you can download Google XML Sitemaps Generator for WordPress. This is a fully automatec tool as it will update your XML Sitemap file everytime you publish a new post or page.

#2 Submitting XML Sitemap To Search Engines

Once you have generated XML Sitemap, the next step is to submit it to various search engines. One of the tool you can use for submission is XML Sitemap Validator. It does not only validate your XML Sitemap but it also notify various search engines. I strongly recommend you use Google Webmaster Tool to submit your XML Sitemap to Google because it provides many features for you to know your website status in Google.

Conclusion

XML Sitemap does not help in the search engine rankings but it does provide additional useful information for search engines to know your web pages better. I recommend that you implement XML Sitemap on your website. and blogs if you haven’t done so.