Through sitemaps, you can give signals/information to the search engine crawlers about the pages that you just updated or modified. This tells them that the particular pages contain new information that should be taken into consideration when they rank those specific pages. Your Website – Sitemaps are files that can contain a massive number of URLs. This means that if you have a massive website, you won’t have trouble having most of your pages crawled and, hopefully, indexed by search engines. One example would be e-commerce sites that have hundreds to thousands of pages for their products. Crawler Navigation and Discovery – Since crawlers use internal and external links to crawl the websites on the world wide web this poses problems for webmasters that are not well-versed with proper internal linking structure processes and proper link building tactics.
Through sitemaps, these webmasters
can inform crawlers that their pages exist – even if no other page is linking to them. But I strongly recommend constantly improving your website’s internal linking and link building processes since it’s more beneficial for SEO. How Do You Create a Sitemap? A sitemap is pretty easy to create. This is especially true for WordPress users. You just need to download the Google XML Sitemaps plugin. Activate the plugin and let it do its magic. It will automatically generate a sitemap for your website. It also automatically includes newly published posts or pages in your sitemap, so you don’t need to manually enter it. Google XML Sitemap Plugin Screenshot After the plugin has generated your sitemap, you can find the sitemap when you add “/sitemap.
xml” to your domain name. For example, our
sitemap can be found in: https://seo-hacker.com/sitemap.xml You can also alternatively use Yoast SEO’s integrated sitemap creation feature. If you’re optimizing your WordPress website for search, chances are you’re already using Yoast SEO’s sitemap creation feature and there are no problems with that. Yoast SEO Plugin Screenshot It’s important for you to remember to only activate ONE of these plugins when it comes to sitemaps. If you already activated Yoast SEO’s sitemap, don’t install the Google XML Sitemaps plugin anymore. You’ll only be giving yourself additional hassle and workload if you activate them both, so make sure only one of them is activated. For those who are not using WordPress, there are a lot of XML sitemap generators available in the market, but you can use this online XML Sitemaps generator tool too.
It’s pretty easy and they provide a step-by-
step approach for you to implement your sitemap in your website. Sitemap Best Practices After creating your website’s sitemap, there are a number of best practices you should do to ensure that it’s properly working and optimized. That said, here are some sitemap best practices we do at SEO Hacker to ensure that our client’s sitemap is a stepping stone for SEO success: 1. Dynamic Sitemaps A dynamic sitemap is a type of sitemap that possesses a set of rules that allow them to update themselves whenever you make changes to your pages. This is extremely helpful for large websites or publishers that regularly update a large number of pages since a dynamic sitemap automatically updates itself when a rule is followed.
Dynamic Sitemaps are also easier to access
and crawl for search engine bots/crawlers albania phone number library and are relatively safer from being corrupted. 2. Plugin/Tools As I’ve mentioned, sitemaps are important which is why developers around the world and even Google produced tools and plugins that assist webmasters and SEOs with sitemap generation and management. Again, For WordPress websites, the Yoast SEO plugin already has a built-in XML sitemap generator which is used by a large number of webmasters. You can also install Google XML Sitemaps to create them as well. After creation, it’s a best practice to submit the generated sitemap to Google Search Console. Click the “Sitemaps” button in the sidebar of your Google Search Console property, then just put your sitemap URL Slug in the space provided and click submit.
SEO hacker Sitemap GSC Submission 3
Priority Pages In sitemaps, there’s a Google protocol where you can give scores to your page between 0.1 to 1 – 1 being the highest. Pages that have higher scores are given priority in crawling and they’re also more regularly crawled than lower scored pages. The best practice here is to assign higher scores to pages that are more regularly updated or more important pages. Having these pages crawled more often by Google is important since you want Google or other search engines to SEE and KNOW what changes you made and how those changes added more value to the page. Since it’s up to you as the webmaster to assign these scores, you need to remember that it’s not a best practice to give ALL your pages the same score to give priority to all of them.
Google crawlers are constantly improved and
they also function through algorithmic your prospects don’t find you in search results processes. This means that they’ll have a harder and longer time understanding which pages are regularly updated as compared to other, static pages. 4. Avoid Noindexed Pages Putting noindex tags in your pages means that you don’t want those pages showing up in the search results. This could encompass a lot of pages such as log-in, checkout, resource, or WordPress pages. This is self-explanatory but avoid including pages that you’ve labeled as noindex in your sitemap. Your sitemap should contain only the pages that you WANT to show up in the search results which is why intentionally or accidentally including noindexed pages in your sitemap is contradictory and causes errors in your Google Search Console coverage report.
This is easily avoided by being mindful of
the pages included in your sitemap and by thailand data doing regular sitemap check-ups. If one way or another, you included a noindexed page in your sitemap, this is what it would look like after you validate the appropriate fixes: GSC Submitted URL Noindex Screenshot If you really want to get high-quality links for your website, I’ve got some good news and bad news for you. The good news: email outreach is going to be one of your best friends. The bad news is, it’s a long and painful experience. Email outreach takes a lot of work and patience. but yes, it still does and it is one of the few methods in today’s link building that is legitimate and can boost your rankings.