One of the most recurring suggestions among SEO experts is the creation of an XML Sitemap, which is nothing more than a list with all the pages of your site and some attributes.
This Sitemap should be submitted to the search engines and in this article we will discuss its advantages and how to do it.
Why create an XML Sitemap
Make sure all pages can be indexed
Very deep pages that receive few links or are not very accessible (many clicks of the main pages) may end up not being identified and indexed by Google. Having these pages in the Sitemap is a guarantee that the searcher will know of the existence of this content and can index it and thus present it as a search result.
This is even more important for new sites (which have received few links) or sites with dynamic content.
Help search engines understand the structure of the site and better index the content
Sitemap information helps search engines better understand your site. This can help them on items such as choosing the main page in case of duplicate content or identifying the main pages and thereby choosing a more suitable calendar for crawling.
An interesting option is that your company can add tags and give “suggestions” of priority and frequency for each page. The last change date also helps to tell Google which content to re-read.
Give a positive sign of confidence
Creating and submitting the Sitemap signals to the search engines that you are a worried webmaster and are investing in the quality of your site. This works as a positive sign of trust / authority and can help in ranking.
Creating your Sitemap
There are some tools that make Sitemaps very easy to create. If your site / blog uses the WordPress platform, simply install a plugin like the Better WordPress Google XML Sitemaps .
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For other sites, you can use Google Sitemap Generator . The download of the tool helps a lot in creating a map from scratch.
Finally, you can create the file manually, as a document in XML format. All formatting instructions can be found on this sitemap.org page .
Where the Sitemap should be
- The Sitemap must be hosted on your server, in the same subfolder as the URLs listed there.
- Do not forget to send to Google Webmaster Tools
- If you still do not use the Google webmaster tool , please register now.
- This is where we can indicate the Sitemap to Google and see how it is being read, if it presents errors, etc.
- XML Sitemap in Google Webmaster Tools
Apart from this, the tool still has several advantages, such as displaying indexing problems, page HTML failures, number of times the site is displayed on the search results page, and more.