What Makes an XML Sitemap Important for Good SEO?

Does preparing an XML sitemap for your website sound like a hassle? A part of technical SEO, the concept behind an XML sitemap isn’t too technical, after all. While XML stands for “Extensible Markup Language” a pattern in which information is presented, a sitemap is nothing but a roadmap containing different addresses (URLs) on your website. And, when you combine these two, you get an XML sitemap. In other words, however number of webpages you have on the website, you simply include the URL of each webpage in the sitemap formatted in an XML file.

What is the purpose, you ask? We discuss all that and more in this blog. So, if you are intrigued to know more, keep reading till the end.

Introduction to an XML Sitemap – The Table of Content of Your Website

In simple terms, an XML sitemap is that true guide of Google that helps its crawlers understand and index important pages on your website effectively. And as you know, the quicker your webpages are indexed, the faster their chances of getting ranked on the search engine result page.

Creating an XML sitemap for your website is not mandatory, but it has become a standard practice given its proven role in delivering optimal SEO performance. With an XML sitemap readily available, the search engine crawlers needn’t do any guesswork to identify and index the important pages on a website. The XML sitemap allows Google to crawl through your website while alerting it to new notifications like the publication of new content, modification of current content or the time-frequency of new updates.

In this connection, to include the right Metadata tags becomes important because the search engine crawlers refer to them when deciding how frequently they should re-crawl the webpages in the sitemap. So, here the most important tags you must include without fail…..

• <loc> - the location of a webpage on your website

• <lastmod> - the last time any change was made on a webpage

• <changefreq> - how frequently the changes are made

• <priority> - how important is a webpage on a value ranging between 0.0 to 1.0.

This information might look basic, but when arranged properly, it works the best for Google to understand your website architecture in the overcrowded world of internet. So, if you are looking for quick wins for SEO, then an XML sitemap is one area you must invest your effort in.

What to Include and Exclude from the Sitemap?

Now that you know what Meta data tags go into the XML sitemap, you have to understand what from your website needs to be included in this document.

To include – Begin with the home page of your website (that’s no brainer, but deserves a mention). Next, include every page that has high-quality content and the potential of bringing quality traffic to the site.

To exclude – It takes a critical eye to pinpoint what exactly is wrong with your website, and hence preparing the list of things to exclude is more challenging than deciding what to include.

Since adding ‘bad’ content in an XML sitemap is like shooting yourself in the foot, you will want to keep aside all pages with thin, duplicate, and low-quality content.

But, remember leaving an URL out of the XML sitemap does not guarantee that Google will not index it. If Google ends up finding it through various other links, it can as well index the URL.

So, should you want to have greater control over what is shown up or not on the search results, you can simply add a ‘no-index’ tag and prevent non-performing content from coming up on the SERP.

Seems too technical for you? Hire a specialist on digital marketing services who can follow the right protocols to maximise your online visibility.

Time to Learn the Limitations of XML Sitemaps…

An XML sitemap is definitely the trick you need to improve your SEO performance, but it comes with some limitations that you must know. So, here are a couple of things you would like to bear in mind.

Although they work great for large websites, XML sitemaps will comprise up to 50,000 webpage URLs only. Also, when compressed, their file size gets restricted to 50MB. To navigate around these constraints, you may have to create separate XML files for different media type like images, news, videos, and so on. Further, when you split the XML sitemap into smaller site sections, it ensures better indexation and improves the prospect of website ranking on the search engine.

With plenty of tools available out there, creating the XML sitemap becomes an easy task to accomplish. But, if you are not confident about dealing with it all on your own, you can hire help from a top SEO agency India. Once the experts complete these tasks, they can as well use gzip for compressing and optimizing the file.

Prepare for the Ultimate Step…..

Done including all details in the XML sitemap? It is now time to upload the same to the root directory of your website. You can go slightly overboard by referencing the sitemap in the robots.txt file, and thus improve the discoverability of webpages by the search engine.

And as you plan on submitting it to Google, make sure your website is integrated with Google Search Console already. The steps are easy to follow from here on – click on ‘Sitemaps’ from the dashboard, tap on ‘Add a new sitemap’, enter the URL, and select ‘Submit’.

That’s it. Your work comes to an end, let Google handle the rest!

Closing Thoughts – Like how we need GPS for travelling far and wide, search engine crawlers need an XML sitemap to find and index the URLs on your website. While you may rely on your content management system or some third-party tools for an auto-generated sitemap, understanding deeply the site structure is important to improve your brand’s SEO efforts by making the right modifications. Now, with this guide at your fingertips, updating the XML sitemap of your website remains no more an elusive piece of work. So, are you ready to give it a try? All the very best!