Google and other search engines use robots – also called “crawlers” or “spiders” – to find pages on the Internet. These robots index the content of websites so that they appear in search engine results.
Web crawlers often index these pages fairly quickly. However, it can take them longer to find specific pages due to the sheer volume of content circulating on the web. They may also miss some hotspots if your website is exceptionally large or complex to navigate.
Fortunately, an Extensible Markup
Language (XML) sitemap makes this overseas data process easier. A markup language is a series of tags or codes that describe the text of an online document. An XML sitemap provides detailed information about a website’s URLs.
What is this sitemap? We’ll cover everything you need to know about XML sitemaps , including:
- What they are
- Which websites should include them?
- What should they look like?
- How they differ from HTML sitemaps
- Tips for their implementation
What is an XML sitemap?
An XML sitemap is a text file that lists all the pages on your website that you want search engines to index. Its main purpose is to ensure that Google can:
- Locate and crawl all of these pages successfully.
- Understand the structure of your website and its content.
- Stay up to date with new content.
Businesses looking to grow their traffic want Google to crawl all the key pages on their website. However, pages without internal links pointing what should an xml sitemap look like? to them are difficult to find. An XML sitemap makes the content discovery process easier. It provides crawlers with a handy directory—or cheat sheet, if you will—of the pages you want them to see.
An XML sitemap can also include additional technical details, such as:
- Date of last update or modification of the page
- Priority of the page relative to other pages on the website
- Frequency of content changes
- Are there versions of cn leads the URL in other languages?
Remember that XML sitemaps are intended for search engine robots, not human users.
