In seo we have listen lot’s of techniques to rank webpages but most important thing is index your WebPages as soon as possible. XML sitemap main benefit is, it help search engines to find out the important WebPages of your website which you want to index. XML sitemap create an invitation card for search crawlers and invite them to crawl and index your WebPages. This post will help seo beginners to start their journey error free by avoiding mistakes and improving seo results.
What Is XML Sitemap ?
Search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo have algorithm which read machine language and XML(Extensible Markup Language) machine language which help search engines to read your documents.
If we generally talk about general sitemap, it contains all important pages of your website. Commonly sitemaps are created in two formats 1. HTML format 2. XML format. HTML sitemaps are used to list out important pages for users and XML sitemap used to access important pages by search engines boats.
Role Of XML Sitemap In SEO
We know modern search engines are very smart and they collect pages from different sources. But most of time every site have so many pages they are not crawl by search boats and not index by search engines results. To make your seo efforts effective and make them working properly it’s important to index your all old and newly created webpages as soon as possible.
Also Check :- Best way to expand SEO Keyword Research
Here XML sitemap set a role of hero person in seo, because it contains all of your important pages you want to index in search results and make a request to index these pages with proper priority setup.
It helps websites to increase their weight by indexing every possible urls and increase the total number of WebPages per site as soon as possible. Age of indexing url is also a major factor in seo and by indexing your pages quickly it increase your page urls age.
What Url’s You May Exclude In XML Sitemap?
Every website has lots of sensitive, private, duplicate and other formatted with different tags pages. When you create sitemap for your website make sure you have include all possible pages you don’t want to include in your website.
If you have some pages contain duplicate content, NoIndex , canonical tag and some protected pages you don’t want to exclude then never list out your page url’s in XML sitemap.
In Google boat found your pages with noindex page or pages contain duplicate content and you included them in XML sitemap. In that case there are more chances search boats will crawl and index them and create duplicate or low quality pages who can affect your SEO efforts.
How To Create XML Sitemap For Your Website?
If you are using small HTML/CSS or website build on server side script and want to create manually xml site map then follow or copy the below script format and save with relevant name and .XML extension.
<? Xml version=”1.0” encoding=”UTF-8”>
<sitemapindex xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9”>
<sitemap>
<loc>www.yourwebsite.com/page-1 <loc>
<sitemap>
<sitemapindex>
This is basic format of XML sitemap, but you use some other add ons like priority and last modify with your URL’s. If you have 5 pages then use <sitemap>page-2 url</sitemap> and list out all pages with their url’s you want to include.
Generally this type of sitemap saved with sitemap.xml and then uploads this page to your server and submits your XML-Sitemap to Webmaster tools of search engines.
Managing XML Sitemaps Limit
Everything available with limits are working perfect in seo or everywhere in the world. XML sitemap also have some limit like size of sitemap file and no of urls you included. You may include total 50,000 url’s in single sitemap and maximum size of allowed file should not to exceed from 10MB .
But most of time we are working on large website and we have to manage our sitemaps properly that they are under limits. To manage this type of situation we use together xml sitemaps in which we create a main index file and some other small sitemap files for different category and Archie.
What is the use of frequency and priority XML tags in sitemap file?
The frequency and priority XML tags are used to specify how often a webpage should be crawled or if it is on the site map. The frequency tag tells Google how many days it should wait before crawling your webpage again. You can use this to help control how often Google crawls your website, while the priority tag specifies which webpages on the sitemap should be crawled first.