HTML sitemap
1. What is a sitemap?
Some
of you may be more familiar with this than others. I’ll give you a quick crash
course on the basics of sitemaps before I show you how to build a website
sitemap on your own.
Simply
put, a sitemap, or XML sitemap, is a list of different pages on a website. XML
is short for “extensible markup language,” which is a way to display
information on a site.
I’ve consulted with so many website owners who are intimidated by this concept because sitemaps are considered a technical component of SEO. But in all reality, you don’t need to be a tech wizard or have a tech background to create a sitemap. As you’ll learn shortly, it’s really not that difficult.
I’ve consulted with so many website owners who are intimidated by this concept because sitemaps are considered a technical component of SEO. But in all reality, you don’t need to be a tech wizard or have a tech background to create a sitemap. As you’ll learn shortly, it’s really not that difficult.
Why do you need a sitemap?
Search
engines like Google are committed to displaying the most relevant results to
people for any given search query. In order do this effectively, they use site
crawlers to read, organize, and index information on the Internet.
Your
sitemap will tell search engines the location of a page on your website, when
it was updated, the updating frequency, and the importance of the page as it’s
related to other pages on your site. Without a proper sitemap, Google bots
might think that your site has duplicate content, which will actually hurt your
SEO ranking.
If
you’re ready for your website to get indexed faster by search engines, just
follow these five easy steps to create a sitemap.
Is a Sitemap important for SEO?
XML Sitemaps are important
for SEO because they make it easier for Google to find your site's
pages—this is important because Google ranks web PAGES not
just websites. There is no downside of having an XML Sitemap and
having one can improve your SEO, so we highly recommend them.
What Are the SEO Benefits of XML & HTML Sitemaps?
A sitemap is (usually) an XML document, containing a list of
pages on your website that you have chosen to tell Google and other search
engines to index.
Google often uses the sitemap file as a guide to the pages available
on your website — even though it may decide not to index every page you list on
your sitemap.
The sitemap also carries information about each page, including
when it was created and last modified, and its importance relative to other
pages on your site. This speeds up the process of indexing pages.
A sitemap is one of those rare things in SEO that Google has
given the big thumbs up to. Normally, Google likes to talk to website owners in
cryptic riddles.
Comments
Post a Comment