How XML sitemap is helpful to improve search engine rankings?

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a technique that can help you get high data traffic on your website. As an effective part of SEO, XML sitemaps help in search engine indexing. It works on all kinds of websites ranging from E-Commerce to standard websites. Creating an XML sitemap for your website helps you with offering a list of web pages and content in a format easy to read for computers. XML sitemaps let your website stand out by helping you with the allocation of desired keywords. So, Firestartup recommends you to use XML sitemaps to make your website stand out.

What is XML Sitemap?

Sitemaps are used for conveying information to search engines about pages available on the websites. XML is the short form of Extensible Markup Language that is used for displaying website information. It forms a list of URLs that contain extra information about different pages, like their update logs. Including XML sitemaps increases a page’s probability of appearing in search engines.

How do XML sitemaps work?

XML sitemaps contain the metadata about your page in a standardized format. While it does not look very different from an HTML sitemap, it is still more complex compared to it. It uses absolute URLs, so you can’t add your page directly to it and have to add it after the URL of your domain. XML sitemaps are targeted towards various search engines. It also gives you the option to show your sitemaps only to search engines. Here are different sitemaps:

1. Normal sitemaps: These are the most common and are present on almost every website.
2. Image sitemaps: Images can also be added to regular sitemaps, but it is better to create a separate XML file for them if they are in a large number.
3. Video sitemaps: You can easily list videos in a sitemap concerning your URL.
4. News Sitemaps: These are extremely useful for news websites, as you can specify news in your sitemap, which helps it appear in the news tab of search engines.

Why should you use XML sitemaps?

Search engines keep changing their algorithm to optimize the user experience. It is important to use your sitemaps effectively to amplify your website’s reach. XML sitemaps also help the search engines with mapping locations of particular pages on your website, their purpose, and in identifying your content’s update frequency. Proper use of XML sitemaps can cause an increase in the ranking on your website. XML Sitemaps are useful in the following situations:

• When you own a large website: XML sitemaps help large websites by increasing the indexing speed of their pages. Since large websites are also updated frequently, a proper setup of XML sitemaps can ensure that its important pages are indexed properly.
• When a site has bad internal linking: Irregular linking of pages can make it harder for search engines to crawl it. XML sitemaps can help in these scenarios, but having missing internal linking can lead to other issues with search engines. sitemaps help maintain temporary stability on your website for a time while such linking issues are being resolved.
• When a site is new and has a small number of backlinks: If there aren’t many websites where you have linked your pages, XML sitemaps can help search engines in discovering your pages more quickly.

XML sitemaps are important assets to any website and their optimal utilization can lead to a better ranking of your websites and better traffic to it. Firestartup will analyze XML sitemaps of your website and optimize them to get the desired results and make huge profits.