Sitemap: An Underestimated SEO Tool
For website indexing, a search engine needs intrasite links in order to navigate from page to page. This is called crawling.
This stage is very tedious and demands a lot of resources from search engine crawlers.
Sitemap protocol was created in order to ensure that information could be updated faster. Sitemap protocol is a recognized standard for the 3 biggest search engines: Google, Yahoo!, and Live Search.
A sitemap is not the traditional map of a website that one finds at nearly all HTML format websites. The sitemap protocol for search engines is done in an XML file that lists all of a site’s URLs. A specific format must be respected.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>
<lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.8</priority>
</url>
</urlset>
Here you can obtain more information about sitemap protocol.
A sitemap can be submitted in several ways. Some search engines allow submissions through a webmaster console, via a ping method or by inserting the following into your website robots.txt file:
sitemap:http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml
Recently, other sitemap models have been found on Google.
The video sitemap offers a series of optimization tools that help videos to show up in natural search engine results. For example, tools that allow webmasters to provide source information, insert a description, a title, a category, and keywords. In other words, one can provide information about all types of media in sitemaps.
Blog-created feeds can be registered as an RSS 2.0 or an Atom 1.0 sitemap.
With the intention of optimizing its web presence, geolocalization can also have a sitemap by providing URL file information in KLM or geoRSS format. As time goes on, geolocalization is finding its place in natural search engine results.
Search engines are constantly offering more tools and increasing their compatibility with different formats. Sitemaps are a good way to make them known and to optimize their presence in natural search engine results.
Source:
Google webmaster’s help
Image source:
MasterNewMedia
Adapted by: Jessica Hartstein
Tags: geolocalization, sitemap
