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SEO Jargon Buster: Sitemaps

Welcome back to our Seo Jargon Buster series of blog posts, and this time we will be taking a closer look at sitemaps.

What is a sitemap?

A sitemap is a file that lists all the pages on your website, and this is then submitted to Google and other Search Engines to tell them how they are organised. The search engine web crawlers, such as Googlebot and Bingbot, then read the submitted file to crawl the website more efficiently and intelligently.

Further to this, a sitemap also provides search engines with valuable metadata attached to these pages, and this includes when the page was last updated, how often changes are made to it, and how important the page is relative to others on the site.

Sitemaps also play a crucial part in alerting search engines to media that appears on your website, including images and video content. Through a sitemap, search engines can learn a video’s running time, category, and age appropriateness, as well as an image’s subject matter, format, and licensing details.

When do you need a sitemap?

If the linking structure of your website is set up properly, it is highly-likely that the search engine crawlers will discover most of your website on its own.

However, a sitemap can ensure that your website is crawled properly, and this is especially true for sites that meet the following criteria:

Your website has a lot of pages. Submitting a sitemap to search engines will ensure that all relevant pages are not overlooked by their crawlers.

Your website is new. It is very likely that your new website will have very few external links pointing to it, and crawlers discover new websites by following links from one page to another. By submitting a sitemap, you are guaranteeing that the search engines will be aware of your new website.

Your website’s pages are not linked with one another. If the pages on your website do not follow a consistent structure and reference one another rarely, listing all of your pages in a sitemap ensures that they will not be overlooked by search engines.

The post SEO Jargon Buster: Sitemaps appeared first on bSoftware.



This post first appeared on BSoftware | Web Design & Development, SEO, PPC Man, please read the originial post: here

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SEO Jargon Buster: Sitemaps

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