WordPress Website ranking is very important for every site owner because the higher the rating is, the more visitors will see your site and use/buy your service/product/information. Search engines make a substantial contribution to a site promotion, but sometimes they are not able to find and crawl all the pages, even if they are essential.
You can make this process faster and easier for the search engines if you will have a sitemap which is extra beneficial for SEO.
What sitemap does?
The sitemap is an XML file contains many different URLs with their metadata, so via this file, you can provide all kinds of information about available pages to search engines. In this way, they can easily find and crawl every important page of your site without any access problems. Besides, you can inform search engines about the information they need to process in the first place so the crawling won’t take too long.
Why sitemap is so important for SEO?
There is an opinion that sitemaps are actual only for the big sites with a lot of content and large archives, but, to be honest, that’s not exactly true because no matter what website do you have, if it has a problem with the structure or internal linking, the XML sitemap is one of the major essentials.
The great thing about sitemaps is an opportunity to point out all kinds of content to the crawlers and set the last modified date which will be a signal that the page should be crawled first and foremost and the pages which weren’t changed will be skipped, so the crawling will be much faster.
Learn How Google Sitemap Plugin Works
With the Google Sitemap plugin, you can make an XML sitemap without much effort because it generates it automatically and the structure of your website will be extracted much faster by the web crawlers. There are a lot of features that can help you, for example, you can set a maximum number of URLs in the file or set the frequency of content changes as well as external sitemap file updates.
The plugin is compatible with the latest versions of WordPress and it is really human-friendly, so you won’t have any difficulties with the installation and use. Also, it would be useful to know how to make your website SEO friendly – Learn More.
Why sitemap is used?
Apart from those reasons which were mentioned above, there are several other advantages that will make you believe that a sitemap (or sitemaps) is an extra beneficial measure for good SEO and high ranking.
So, first of all, according to Google, content duplication is not an undesirable praxis (no matter what kind of duplication, both syndication and republishing), so if you want to prove that you are an original content maker and not get penalized, you need to use a sitemap. It will show Google the exact time of content publishing and it won’t be considered as a duplicate or spam.
The next positive moment touches upon the quality of the content which is pretty important for the site ranking. XML sitemap will allow you to inform Google that you’ve added a brilliant piece of new content or updated the old one. If you will tell Google about all changes and updates on time, you will be surprised how fast you can improve your ranking.
Can I use a sitemap for images?
Yes, you can! That will be useful in case you want to see your pictures in Google Image Search results. This trick can bring you some extra visitors, but that is not all. You can also create a video sitemap by creating a separate file or adding the information about the video to a sitemap which already exists. In this case, your videos might be considered as an interesting snippet that could be appreciated by random users.
Is it possible to create two or more sitemaps at once?
Sure, one sitemap is usually appropriate for basic or small sites which don’t have more than 100 pages, but when we’re talking about the bigger ones we should think about the addition of the second sitemap. Basically, every sitemap has its URLs limitations and when you will exceed the limit you won’t be able to keep all URLs you need.
If you are using many sitemaps at the same time it is important to create sitemap index file which will be some kind of sitemap for your sitemaps, so the search engines could crawl there without being confused with a difficult structure. By the way, using Google Sitemap plugin you won’t have to do this manually and when the limit will be transcended the plugin will divide the sitemap automatically.
Generally, you need several sitemaps to avoid links overcrowding and to make sure that every page of your website will be crawled and indexed by the search engines. It is also useful when you need to classify and categorize the content and as a bonus, you will get a better online visibility and SEO.
Conclusion
Having an XML sitemap is a great opportunity to promote your website by improving SEO and to get rid of the link mess you might deal with. Right URLs can help search engines to get to all your pages and crawl them in a timely manner so all new or updated content won’t be neglected. A well-tuned sitemap can bring you a lot of advantages and create all the necessary conditions that will promote your website to the top.
