Behind the scenes of the glitz and glamour of your website you will find a sitemap. Back in the day, HTML sitemaps were commonly used to help your visitors navigate your website. Nowadays XML sitemaps, which stands for External Markup Language, is much more common. It provides a communication pathway between your website and search engines. From an SEO perspective, while XML sitemaps are not mandatory, they should definitely be utilized.
As mentioned, an XML sitemap will communicate with search engines. Submitting your sitemap into Google Search Console will help get the pages on your website indexed much faster with search engines. This in turn will help you rank substantially faster in SERPs, or search engine result pages. This is easily one of the most valuable benefits of XML sitemaps.
Hopefully by now you know that frequently updating your website will help with better search rankings. If you don’t have an XML sitemap setup, it could take a while for Google to index your updated content. On the contrary, with an XML sitemap in place, Google will receive automatic notifications when you publish new content or modify pre-existing content. This is especially vital when you are posting news articles or information that is time-sensitive.
If your website doesn’t have an XML sitemap and your navigation structure isn’t setup correctly, search engine bots may have to guess which pages on your site are the most important. Telling Google which pages go under which category helps alleviate some of this guesswork – yet another tremendous benefit of XML sitemaps.
As you can see, there are many benefits to having an XML sitemap installed on your website. Best of all, implementing an XML sitemap is easier than you might think: All it takes is a WordPress plug-in like Yoast SEO or SEO Framework.
Contact Zero Gravity Marketing today for assistance in getting an XML sitemap setup for your website.