SEO has dozens and dozens of different abbreviations and acronyms. It honestly starts getting a little confusing and hard to keep track. This blog post will shed light on one of those confusing abbreviations. We are gonna talk about XML site maps. XML stands for “Extensible Markup language.” It is similar to HTML, but it is designed to store and transport data. XML allows people to define their own tags and label their data how they want to.
An XML site map is a file that tells a search engine (google, bing, yahoo) which URLs should be indexed. They also help in telling the search engine when the page was last changed or modified, how often the page is updated and the importance of that page. While XML sitemaps are not mandatory for SEO, they are highly recommended and can massively help your SEO success. Without an XML sitemap, the SE must rely on hyperlinks to discover pages on your site and it is not efficient at all and decreases the crawlability of your site.
Best XML Sitemap Practices
- You want to be indexed- The SE should be able to index through your sitemap and be able to go to your different pages.
- Return a 200 status code- All of the sites in the sitemap should return 200 status codes. Do not put pages that could become 404 error pages and or 301 redirects this doesn’t allow the SE to index efficiently.
- Make sure to have your site map UTF-8 encoded- This system makes sure that SE’s can understand all the characters in the XML sitemap.
XML site maps are all about helping the search engine index your pages and help them explore your site more efficiently and effectively. XML sitemaps are something I would highly recommend for someone trying to be successful in the SEO business.
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