WEBSITE SITEMAPS The What, Why And How You Need To Know

What is an XML sitemap?

In simple terms, it’s a list of a website’s URLs.

That’s why it’s called a sitemap. It maps out how the website is structured and what the website includes.

(“XML” stands for “Extensible Markup Language,” a way of displaying information on websites.

That’s what an XML sitemap is, but why should you even have one?

What’s the purpose?

Search engines use crawlers to organise and index information on the web.

These crawlers can read all kinds of information but an XML sitemap makes it easy for the crawler to see what’s on your website and index it.

Once it does this, your website has a stronger likelihood of improving its rank quickly.

An XML sitemap works, essentially, as a table of contents for your website, allowing the crawler to get the essentials and index your site accordingly.

Sitemaps can tell search engines when a page was updated, the frequency of updates to the page, the relative importance of pages within a website, and how to find and index content that may be found deep within the site’s structure.

Here’s what the information looks like in a sitemap:

Where the page is located on the website (its URL):  

<http://www.example.com/mypage>

When the page was last changed:  

2018-10-10

How often the page is changed:

monthly

What priority the page has in relationship to other pages on the site:  

1

 Overall these are the benefits: 

  • The XML sitemap tells Google to crawl and index your website.
  • The XML sitemap tells Google what to crawl on your website.
  • The XML sitemap tells Google what kind of information is on your website.
  • The XML sitemap tells Google when your content was updated (which could result in more favourable or “fresh” rankings).
  • The XML sitemap tells Google how often your content is updated.
  • The XML sitemap tells Google how important your content is.
  • The XML sitemap helps your website instantly gain indexation for dynamically-generated pages.
  • The XML sitemap helps to overcome the limitations of a website with weak internal linking.
  • The XML sitemap helps to overcome the challenge of not yet having a strong external link profile.
  • The XML sitemap helps extremely large sites gain better and more organised indexation.
  • The XML sitemap helps Google crawl your website in a more effective way.

 

How do I create a sitemap?

There are many free utilities available to create the sitemap file.

Below are just a few of the web services available: 

 

How do I upload the sitemap to my EVE website?

Once you have the sitemap.xml file, please login to your CMS, go to Settings and then to the Site map tab and upload your file, as shown in the screen shot below.

 

Ideally, the sitemap file will reflect the structure of your website, with the same pages and titles.

Therefore, it is important to update it once a week, for example, to make sure it includes all your new pages as well as changes.

You might also want to update it if you make a considerable number of changes on your site or add new content such as information about new trips and vacations.

Set yourself a reminder in EVE to update and upload your Sitemap on a weekly basis.