Upon the introduction to XML sitemaps in class, I was interested to research more into the topic by reading an article by Search Engine Journal titled “How To Use XML Sitemaps to Boost SEO”. You can find that article here: How To Use XML Sitemaps To Boost SEO. In this blog post, I will detail the main points that were of interest to me!
An XML Sitemap is a file that lists all of your website’s URLs, acting like a roadmap for the site crawlers. The search engine can find all pages in a sitemap with one visit, rather than jumping through internal links to find the intended page. An XML sitemap has a maximum of 50,000 URLs and an uncompressed file size of 50 MB.
It is important to note that there are different types of sitemaps not focused on in this blog such has an image sitemap, video sitemap, HTML sitemap.
Now onto the main point. How do I optimize an XML sitemap?
The firs tip is to only include SEO relevant pages in XML sitemaps. It is recommended now to include 404 URLs, non-canonical URLs, or pages with no index tags. Next, ensure your XML Sitemap is valid by submitting it to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. You should also leverage Sitemap reporting for indexing analysis. This tells you which types of pages were left out to know where to focus attention to. Another broad tip is to strategize Sitemap Size. This is important because search engines impost a limit of 50,000 URLs per sitemap file. Break sitemaps down into groups of 1,000 in order to gain full visibility.
There are only two tags that should be included for a URL: the location tag and the last modified tag. The Loc (location) Tag contains the canonical version of the URL location. The Lastmod (last modified) Tag communicates the date and time the page was published or the last meaningful change to the site. Some other general tips were to invest time to compressing sitemap files and to use image tags in existing sitemaps.
One Response
Great job, Abby! I really enjoyed reading your thoughts in your post. I enjoyed reading about the XML sitemap and how to optimize it. I thought it was interesting how you listed the two tags that ought to be listed in your URL.