To put it simply, a sitemap is a file consisting of all of your website’s URLs. It’s essentially an online map that informs crawlers of indexing platforms what content is available and how it can be reached. Sitemaps enhance the crawling process and are crucial for websites that have:
- Hundreds or thousands of pages and an extensive website structure
- New pages constantly being created and added
- Constant changes and edits of existing pages
- Weak internal links and pages
- A weak external link profile
Indexing platforms can find your URLs without sitemaps, but by including them, you indicate that you consider them high-quality URLs. Although there isn’t a definite guarantee that sitemaps will crawl your URLs faster, rank them, or index them, submitting them will definitely increase your chances!
How Are Sitemaps Created?
Sitemaps are created manually through different plugins and sitemap generator tools. Be alert because your sitemap is immediately outdated when a page is created or removed and will not automatically be updated. Overall, it is relatively simple to create sitemaps. Before doing so, ensure you have your specifications and the correct generator tools. Keep reading below to learn more about the different types of sitemaps!
XML Sitemaps
XML sitemaps can hold a maximum of 50,000 URLs and a file size limit of 50 MB. Once these sitemaps reach their limit, URLs must be split amongst multiple XML sitemaps. Although multiple can be created, be aware that their index files cannot be nested. If you want your sitemap files easily found, submit your sitemap index to Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster tools!
HTML Sitemaps
HTML sitemaps are created to help us find content! They are usually linked to the footer of a website and are known to take link equity from every page on the website.
Image Sitemaps
Image sitemaps are specifically constructed to improve the indexing of image content. This can be accomplished by adding the image XML namespace declaration and image tags into the primary XML sitemap and its URL.
Video Sitemaps
Video sitemaps are similar to image sitemaps because their tags can be added to an existing sitemap. Compared to images, videos in sitemaps have a variety of additional tags. Once you leverage many additional tags together, your video sitemap will be seen as a dedicated one. Adding more extensions will lead to a larger file size, ultimately leading to exceeding file size limits.
Improve Website Visibility by Contacting Boston Web Marketing Today!
If your website is in dire need of expert website visibility help, look no further! The experts at Boston Web Marketing are here to help optimize your website’s sitemaps and improve your SEO strategy! We have significant experience optimizing sitemaps and improving SEO strategies for hundreds of businesses. Make the first step by contacting us today through our website !