With the progress of web, local SEO services and Google too have evolved to a great extent. This means that what is taken to be a good practice might often be a flux. This is particularly true when it comes to site maps. It is almost as old as SEO.
Most of the people know that submitting sitemap is important but they might not know the intricacies to implement them in a manner that will drive the local SEO services key performances.
What is an XML Sitemap?
In simple words, an XML sitemap is a list of the URL in the website. It will serve as a site map to let the search engines know about the contents that are available and how they are going to reach it. A search engine is going is going to find all nine pages on the sitemap with a simple visit to XML sitemap. On this website, it has to jump through five internal links in order to find page nine. The ability of the XML sitemap for assisting the crawlers in a speedy indexation is particularly important for the website which:
- Several pages along with deep website architecture.
- Lacks a strong internal links.
- Frequently added pages.
- Frequently changes content of the existing pages.
- Suffering from orphan pages and weak internal links.
Key Takeaway: Even if the search engines are able to find the URL without it, if you include the pages in an XML sitemap you indicate that you take to be good landing pages. There is no guarantee that the XML sitemap is get the pages crawled, if you submit one, it is going to increase your chances.
XML Sitemap Format: A one-page site that uses all the tags that are available will have the XML sitemap. However, the question is how should the local SEO services use the tags?
Location Tag: This is a compulsory tag having the absolute version of the URL location. It has to reflect the site protocol and if you want to include or exclude www.
Last mod Tag: This is an optional but also a highly recommended tag use for communicating the last modified time and date of the file. This is particularly important for content sites as it helps Google to understand who the original publisher is. Moreover, it will also communicate the freshness.
Change freq: At a certain point of time, the optional tag showed how frequently the content on URL was expected to change the search engines. However, it has been seen that frequency doesn’t have that much significant. Thus, it is better to specify the sitemap directly.
Priority Tag: This tag is optional as it tells the search engine how important is the page in regards to the other URL.
Key Takeaway: Your website will require an XML sitemap. However, it is not the priority and changes the frequency metadata.
There are different types of sitemap and you have to check the ones you actually require. The sitemaps that are available to you are,
- XML Image Sitemap
- XML Video Sitemap
- Google News Sitemap
- Mobile Sitemap
- HTML Sitemap
- Dynamic XML Sitemap
