Role of XML sitemap in Website Promotion

Sitemaps protocol provides for search engine information about the content, which should be included in the index.

Many website optimization specialists consider it irrelevant and ignore this tool. They believe that Google itself will understand the structure of the site and it is not difficult to index all the pages. In some cases it is true, if your site has a small number of pages and  link structure is simple. In such case XML sitemap is not so important. In other cases it is necessary. Indeed, thanks to him, we can show Google what pages of our site to scan more often, which rarely, in which no one should pay attention.

 

Creating of XML sitemap must be approached very responsibly, so as not valid XML sitemap can make the site worse than its absence, possibly because many website optimization specialist and ignore this tool.

 

The following example shows a Sitemap, which contains only a URL-address and uses all optional tags.

 

<?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>

 

<loc> URL-address of the page.

<lastmod> Date when file was last modified

<changefreq>  For those pages, which we leave in the index to establish the probable frequency of updating pages, such values are possible always, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly. Do not try to cheat Google and put the maximum refresh rate pages. It is still not lead to nothing. Keep in mind that the value of this tag is considered a hint and not a command. Despite the fact that search engine crawlers consider this information when making decisions, they may crawl pages marked "hourly" less frequently than that, and the pages marked "yearly" - more often than directed. Crawlers may periodically crawl pages marked "never" to handle unexpected changes to those pages.

 

The next important parameter is the <priority>

Priority of this URL relative to other URL on your site. The valid range - from 0.0 to 1.0. This value does not affect how your pages are compared to pages on other sites - it only lets the search engines know which pages you deem most important for the crawlers.

 

Please note that the priority you did to a page that does not affect the position of your URL on the results of a search engine. Search engines use this information when processing URL, which belong to the same site, so you can use this tag to increase the probability of presence in the search index of your most important pages.

 

In addition, please note that assigning a high priority to all of the URL to your site does not make sense. Since the priority - is relative, this option is used to determine the sequence of processing the URL in your site.

 

It is important not to forget regularly update the site map , Ideally this should happen automatically after the add / remove / edit pages. But, in my opinion, is sufficient to daily updates.