Smart Traffic SEO Tip #23 – XML Sitemap
The XML sitemap is used by Google’s robots when looking at a site and it is a way of telling them what pages are important. It is a list of a site’s pages and submitting them to Google is important to try and help increase the number of pages indexed. Google will not guarantee to index all pages but it could increase the chances of getting pages indexed.
The XML sitemap is very helpful especially if your site is new and has few links pointing to it. It is also useful to a site that has dynamic content or has pages that can’t be discovered easily by Googlebots during the crawl process (Ex. Pages using AJAX). If your site has a lot of pages which are not linking to each other then including them in the XML sitemap is a great way to help Google bots find and hopefully crawl those pages. Aside from helping Google bots in crawling pages the data in the XML sitemap also provides Google information about the site structure.
In creating an XML sitemap it is important to include all important pages of the site, excluding the duplicate pages. It is really important to check your site’s pages, know your site structure and consider consistency for every URL before generating an XML sitemap.
There are guidelines to consider in creating a sitemap and we’ll cover those in tomorrow’s post.
