How can sitemaps boost your content's search engine ranking?

2 Why are sitemaps important for SEO?

Sitemaps are important for SEO because they can improve your content's search engine ranking in several ways. First, they can help search engines find and index your new or updated pages faster, which means they can show up in the search results sooner. Second, they can help search engines prioritize your pages based on their importance, frequency, and freshness, which means they can rank higher for relevant queries. Third, they can help search engines avoid crawling and indexing duplicate or low-quality pages, which means they can save bandwidth and avoid penalties.

4 How to optimize a sitemap?

Optimizing a sitemap for SEO requires following best practices and guidelines. You should only include pages that you want search engines to crawl and index, and exclude irrelevant, duplicate, or restricted ones. Additionally, use the <loc> tag to specify the URL of each page, and the canonical version if there are multiple versions. The <lastmod> tag should indicate the date when each page was last modified in ISO 8601 format (YYYY-MM-DD). The <changefreq> tag should suggest how often each page is likely to change, with one of the following values: always, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, or never. You can also assign a relative priority to each page with the <priority> tag from 0.0 to 1.0 (1.0 being the highest). Finally, use the <image>, <video>, and <news> tags to provide additional information about media or news content on your pages.

5 How to submit a sitemap?

After you create and optimize your sitemap, you need to submit it to search engines so that they can crawl and index your pages. The most common and effective way to do that is to use the search engine's webmaster tools, such as Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools. You can also use the robots.txt file to specify the location of your sitemap, or use the HTTP header to indicate the sitemap URL. You should also update and resubmit your sitemap whenever you add, remove, or modify your pages.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?