Why XML Sitemaps are important to improve SEO of websites?

xml-sitemap-for-seo

There are many SEO advantages, however, the importance of XML sitemaps in SEO is something many web developers miss when they build a business website. In this article, we will be looking at what are the core SEO benefits of having a Google Sitemap for your website.

What is XML Sitemap?

XML Sitemap of your website will contain all the URL’s of the pages, posts and the media files present in your website. By using the XML sitemap, you can make the Google crawler to access your website more effectively and index the contents.

Properly updated XML sitemap will help the Google crawlers to effectively discover and index all your web pages. You can easily create the XML sitemap if you are using the Yoast SEO or All in One SEO plugin.

How Sitemap helps the crawlers?

sitemap in seoGoogle Crawlers will initially follow all the URL’s in the XML sitemap and will index them based on the ranking criteria.

After that, the crawlers will follow the links present in the particular page and will repeat the process in the newly discovered pages.

Thus the crawler will simply follow the links present in the current page to discover the new pages.

Hence proper internal linking is more important to make the crawler to spend more time on your website.

How to Create & submit XML Sitemap?

You can create the XML sitemap for your website by using any plugins like Yoast SEO or All in One SEO plugin.

Later by using the Google Search Console, you can submit the sitemap to the Google.

xml sitemapMake sure that the sitemap doesn’t have any errors while you are submitting.

Sitemap with errors may block some resources from being crawled effectively.

You can test the sitemap in the search console itself before submitting.

Once the URL’s in the sitemap has been indexed by the Google, then it means your web pages are ready to be shown on the SERP.

But the ranks of the web pages on the SERP may depend on the various ranking factors.

XML Sitemap is the most important thing which you should take care to help the crawlers effectively analyze the website and index them.