If your website doesn’t have a sitemap yet, you’re missing out on a valuable aspect of your SEO strategy! Sitemaps help speed up the indexing process, therefore optimizing your chance of ranking high on SERPs. Instead of crawling multiple pages and links on your website, bots and crawlers can simply visit your sitemap to find a single blueprint of all your pages. Upload your sitemap to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Console so that crawlers know that you actually have a sitemap.
How Often Should You Update?
If you have a static site that doesn’t change very often, you may not need to update your sitemap for many months. However, if you’re site includes products, promotions, or blog posts that are constantly changing and being added, you should be a bit more diligent in updating your sitemap. You can do this manually if you don’t make regular changes to your website and resubmit to webmaster consoles. If you are making routine changes, it’s much easier to have your developer automate updates when you add a new page.
Ping Search Engines
Once you’ve uploaded your sitemap to Google and Bing webmaster consoles, you can rest assured that search engines will find them. In fact, they’re probably crawling your site at least once a day. However, if you update your site regularly, you may want to manually ping search engines to let them know you have new content. This ensures that search engines index the freshest content from your site. The process of “pinging” a search engine is pretty simple; just enter your domain in the designated section of the following URLs.
For Google
http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml
For Bing
http://www.bing.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?siteMap=http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml
How Does It Work?
When you “ping” a search engine using the specified URL, you send an HTTP GET request with your sitemap’s URL included. The search engine then scans the URLs on the sitemap to update changed URLs from the previous sitemap. Once you ping the search engine to the let them know you have new content, you’ll receive a confirmation message that looks something like this:
What are the Benefits of a Sitemap?
Sitemaps streamline the indexing process. They’re especially helpful if you have a website with a lot of pages. It takes search engines a substantial amount of time to crawl each individual page for relevant content to present to the user. With a sitemap, you can help streamline the process by telling search engines they only need to crawl a single page to find all of your website’s content. In fact, search engines prioritize websites that utilize a sitemap.
Building a sitemap can be quite technical, but it’s also really important. The idea of adding yet another routine task to your agenda might seem a bit overwhelming. Sevaa Group can help you automate the process so that you can worry less about tech and focus more on running a business. Talk to us about how we can streamline your SEO strategy!
