Sitemaps are helpful in assisting web crawlers to discover pages and content in your website. They provide Google with the details about where to find information, such as page details, images, videos and other files hosted on your website.
The purpose of a sitemap is to help Google to easily crawl your website. This can give a boost to your SEO ranking because Google will understand your website better.
The other benefits of having a sitemap for your website is to help Google in updating your pages when you change certain details.
The following are few things to include in your site sitemap;
- Good Structure Of Your Website
Your sitemap should be easy to understand and be structured correctly. This will make it easier for Google bots to get accurate information about the pages on your website.
- Information About A Specific Type Of Content In Your Website
What kind of content does your website deal with? Is it entirely text articles, videos or image content? It’s important to specify this kind of information because it will help search engines to better understand your site and this helps ranking.
- Video Sitemap
If you host several videos on your website, then a video sitemap will be helpful. It will specify various details about your video such as running time, category or even age rating. All these details improve the discoverability of your video content.
- Image Sitemap
If you host images on your site, it’s important to have an image sitemap. This will bear information such as image subject matter, license and the type of image.
Do I Need a Sitemap?
Most people wonder whether it’s still necessary to have a sitemap on their website, because their pages are being discovered on the search engine. However, a sitemap will improve ranking and this can further improve your discoverability on search.
If your site is a big, complex or if it holds specialised files, then a sitemap will be necessary. When you have a large website, Google can ignore updating recently added pages, which can take a hit on your SEO. This is the reason why a sitemap is really necessary if you have a large website.
If your site is full of media contents such as videos, images or Google News content, it is important to have a sitemap.
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