Every complex website must have a sitemap if you look from an SEO standpoint. Sitemaps are a vital part of your technical SEO plan. It helps Google crawlers to better scan your website. Search engines utilize sitemaps to index your website. Having search engines crawl your website more intelligently, you can improve your website rankings and drive more potential traffic. 

In today’s article, we will learn all about Sitemap

Table of contents

• • What is a Sitemap in SEO?
  • Why do we need a Sitemap for SEO?
  • What are the types of Sitemaps in SEO?
  • Why Sitemaps are important in SEO?
  • How to create a Sitemap for SEO?

 

What is a Sitemap in SEO?

A sitemap is a file placed on your site which provides you with information about the pages, texts, videos, URLs, and other files. Search engines like Google use sitemaps to understand your website and its structure in a better way, while web users can use them to find specific pages on your site. It can help you in SEO if your site’s content is well-prepared and attractive to web users.

 

Why do we need to Optimize Website Sitemap for SEO?

A large and complex website must have a sitemap as it is a list of web pages created for crawlers to find your web content as fast as possible. Your website will benefit from having a sitemap, and you will never be punished for having one. It can help crawlers to scan larger and more complex sites. A sitemap is important for SEO as it provides faster indexation, better indexation of deep pages, and monitoring of index pages.

You need a sitemap if –

• • Your website is too large web crawlers might overlook some of your newly updated web content.
  • Your website content is changed frequently.
  • You need to index your new content fast.
  • Your website has a lot of heavy media content such as videos, and images. Google takes additional information from sitemaps into account for web search.
  • Your website is recently launched and has a few external links. Google crawlers scan the web by following the external links from one page to another. If your site is new Google might not discover your content pages if no other site is linked to them. A Sitemap helps Google to find out the newest web pages or all web pages together on a website.
  • Your website has a large archive of content pages that are not properly linked to each other. If your pages do not naturally reference each other, you can list them in a sitemap to make sure that Google discovers them.

 

Let me tell you something loud and clear –

“A sitemap does not help to boost your rankings.”

A sitemap is not for you if –

• • Your website is “small”.
  • Your website is a portfolio website.
  • Your website is widely linked internally.
  • Your website doesn’t have heavy or fresh media files.
  • Your website is a one-page presentation. 
  • Your website is a SaaS application or website for an organization.

 

What are the Types of Sitemaps in SEO?

There are 2 kinds of sitemaps often used by SEO professionals for their SEO strategy to target search engine crawlers and users.

Let us know about the 2 main types of sitemaps.

1. HTML sitemaps (Hyper-Text Mark-up Language)

HTML sitemaps are written for the users to browse, not search engine bots. It is visible to the website user. Search engine bots crawl through the HTML sitemaps and send strong user experience signals to Google.

HTML sitemaps are often placed at the footer of your website to help you navigate from one page to another. Your HTML sitemap should have links that help users navigate from your site. You can organize your HTML site map such that – it is the directory of your website.

2. XML sitemaps (eXtensible Mark-up Language)

XML sitemaps are written for search engine bots to crawl, not the users. XML sitemaps are used to share technical details of your site, like how many pages you have and how often they’re uploaded. These are digital maps that help Google discover important web pages of your site and how frequently they are updated. You might want to communicate with your search engines when things change on your website. 

XML sitemaps are important but mostly underrated. An XML sitemap is for websites that are new, large, utilize lots of images, and videos, and have lots of orphaned pages. They allow search engines to discover fresh pages even if they are not linked to the main website. Search engine crawlers prioritize XML sitemaps for faster crawling.

An XML sitemap is further divided into –

• Image sitemap: Image sitemap is used for images to get featured on Google Image Search.
• Video sitemap: Video sitemap is used for videos to get featured in Google Video Search. It helps search bots to better understand the video content.
• News sitemap: News sitemap is used for news to get featured in the “news section” Google SERPs. It is mandatory for a news website. It can not contain news articles that are published 2 days prior. A news sitemap can not have more than 1000 URLs. You can break 1000 URLs into multiple sitemaps and use a sitemap index file. 
• Mobile sitemap: Mobile sitemap is used only for the specially formatted version designed for mobiles. As per reports, there is no need for a mobile sitemap in SEO for a mobile-friendly website.

 

HTML Sitemap vs XML Sitemap

HTML and XML both are coding languages used to create web pages. When it comes to sitemaps, the only difference between them is that XML is written only for search engine crawlers, while HTML focuses on making a user-friendly website for humans.

 

Why Sitemaps are Important in SEO?

Well-executed SEO means making your site crawlable and accessible.  A sitemap in SEO is important as it keeps your website organized.  

Here are a few benefits of using Sitemaps for SEO –

• • Makes your website user-friendly
  • Make it easy for search engines to classify your content
  • Helps you to find internal linking opportunities
  • Organize large sites
  • Determine areas to improve website navigation
  • Provides faster indexing
  • Automatically index your updated content
  • Increases visibility of your website in SERPs

 

How to Create a Sitemap for SEO?

Having a good sitemap for your website greatly increases the chances of your website’s content showing up in relevant searches. If your business makes money from your website, then have a look at the following steps to create a sitemap.

1. Review your website structure 

The first thing you need to check is to see how your website structure is built. See how the existing content is structured on your site. Start from the homepage and see where your homepage links to. You might figure this out easily with the help of menu options on your website. But, when it comes to SEO, all pages are not created equally.  Keep the depth of your website in mind while reviewing your site. Pages away from your website’s homepage will be difficult to rank.

As per the search engine guide, you should aim to create a sitemap having shallow depth, which means it takes only 3 clicks to navigate to any of your website pages. That’s much better for SEO.

You must create a hierarchy of pages based on how you want them to be indexed and their importance. Follow a logical hierarchy while prioritizing your content. 

 

2. Code your URLs

Now that you have gone through all of your web pages and determined the importance of each page and matched that importance in your website structure; it’s time for coding the URLs.

The best possible way to do this is by formatting each URL with XML tags. It will be very easy for you if you have experience in HTML coding. The “ML” in the term XML stands for mark-up language which is the same in HTML. Start by getting a text editor to create an XML file. The text editor must be a plain text editor like windows, notepad, or TextEdit for Mac users. 

Then add the code for each URL.

• • Location
  • Changed frequency
  • Last updated
  • Priority of the page

 

Here is an example of how coding will look for each one

• • http://speedtest.ecsion.com/page1
  • weekly
  • 2022-1-2
  • 3

This method is best for small size websites as you have to manually enter the text on each page. Text editor makes it easier when it comes to adding code for each URL, but you need to be sharp as it is a manual job. Take your time and ensure that you go through each step properly.

 

3. Validate the code

While coding manually, human error is natural. But, for your sitemap to run properly, you can’t make any mistakes in your code.

Luckily, there are software tools available online to validate your code to make sure your syntax is error-free. You can find multiple tools on Google search for sitemap validation.

The sitemap validator tool helps to check whether your sitemap is formatted correctly or not. It will inform you straight away in case of any syntax error. You can check what is the problem in your sitemap and fix that issue before submitting it to Google.

For example, if you miss out on adding an end tag in your syntax or something similar, it can be quickly identified and fixed.

 

4. Add your sitemap to the root and robots.txt

Find the location of your root folder and add your sitemap file to this folder. It will add the page to your website as well. This is not an issue, lots of websites have this. Just type in the website address and add “/sitemap/” to the URL and see what pops up.

Here’s an example for the Apple website https://speedtest.ecsion.com/sitemap/

Now, this can be taken 1 step further by looking at the code on different websites by adding “/sitemap.xml” to the URL.

For example, https://speedtest.ecsion.com/sitemap.xml  

By adding a sitemap to your root folder, you might want to add it to the robots.txt file which you will find in the roots folder as well. 

But, what is the robot.txt file?  why it is important to add your sitemap file link to the robots.txt file?

Well, the robots.txt file is just a simple text file that is placed in your website’s root folder. It has different uses. It gives direction to the unknown crawlers by using a set of instructions to tell search engine bots which page on your site they can crawl and which page they should ignore. On the robots.txt page, if you add “disallow” on your site, crawlers ignore it.  This file allows you to block specific robots from crawling your website. 

For example, if a site is under development, it makes sense to block the robots from having the access to crawl the website until it’s ready to be launched.

Robots.txt file is the first place that the spiders or crawlers visit when accessing a website.

If you have multiple sitemaps, you can add all sitemap files locations in a sitemap index file. The XML format of the sitemap index file is the same as the sitemap file, making it a sitemap of sitemaps.

When you have multiple sitemaps, you can either specify your sitemap index file URL in your robots.txt or you can specify individual URLs for each of your sitemap files.

 

5. Submit your sitemap

Now, that you know how to create and add a sitemap to your website files, it’s time to submit it to the search engines. For the next step, go to the Google search console. On the Google search console dashboard, Navigate to Crawl and select Sitemaps from the drop-down menu. Next, click on Add/ Test sitemap on the right-hand side of the screen. You can test your sitemap for any errors before you continue. In case of any mistake, you can quickly fix it and then submit it.

Google handles everything else ahead of this. This helps search engine spiders to index your website with ease, which will increase your SEO ranking.

 

Conclusion

If you wish to take your SEO strategy to the next level, you must create a sitemap of your site. If you don’t want to change the code manually, the internet is full of resources that can help you create a sitemap for SEO without needing to manually edit the code.

The keyword is “KEY” to drive truly qualified leads to your website. Keyword  Research in SEO helps you to reach business goals like getting more pageviews,  higher ranking on search engines, capturing potential leads, and so on.  

In this guide, you will learn one of the important concepts of SEO – Keyword  Research 

If you are a beginner then this guide is for you. Read on to learn every aspect of keyword research in search engine optimization. 

It is important to define what you want to achieve before you begin. So today my  goal is to define: 

1. What is Keyword Research? 
2. Importance of Keyword Research
3. Benefits of Keyword Research
4. How to Perform Keyword Research for SEO? 

Now let’s begin… 

 

What is a Keyword Research for SEO? 

 

Keyword research is the process of finding focus keywords to drive more traffic to your business. It provides insight into the search data that your target  audience is looking for on the Google search engine, which helps you to understand 

What searchers are searching on search engines? 

How many searchers are looking for it? 

Let me simplify it for you,  

Imagine you are planning to publish a blog of pasta recipes, where you want to write on topics like – 

Pasta recipe step by step | Easy recipes

Pasta recipes with white sauce | Simple Italian recipes 

Easy pasta recipes | Recipes for beginners;

but you are unsure how these blogs are going to drive traffic

So, if you want to drive good traffic then you need to take care in choosing the right keyword to get the right traffic. 

This all starts with keyword research. 

 

What is the Importance of Keyword Research for SEO?

 

Keyword research is one of the most important steps in search engine optimization for getting the right traffic to your website. The difference between a website getting millions of traffic through an organic search channel and those getting no traffic at all are the keywords you employ in the content. If you don’t pay attention to this factor, it is sure you will miss the mark on your market. 

If you are still asking, why keywords research?  

Let me simplify it a little more for you, 

Say that you are writing a lot of different topics around Pasta recipes, but you are not sure about how your blogs will drive traffic.  

For example, 

Someone wants to make a pasta recipe so he goes online and searches for “Best pasta recipes” or “Red sauce pasta recipes” on his smartphone and the search engine shows him results. But your page is not listed on the first page of the search engine page results.  

“Easy pasta recipes | Recipes for beginners “may not be the right choice of keywords for your pasta recipe blog. 

Generally, people do not go past the first page on the search engine page results.  So, the aim of a blogger is to get to the top position on SERPs.

So, Hey! 

You need to find the best keywords to align it to your content and find out what the target audience is searching for online. 

That’s the idea why we would do Keyword Research for SEO.  

 

Benefits of Keyword Research for SEO

 

If you have a website, but you are unaware of what people are looking for online will leave your business stranded in a desert of inactivity. 

This issue is solved by researching keywords. 

So, let’s understand the importance of keywords in SEO. Here are a few benefits of  Keyword research. 

• • Gives You Direction

When you start researching keywords, this gives you more focus and direction.

For example, if you are writing a food blog, you may have an idea about what you are going to write. But you must focus more on what people want to read. This will help you to understand people’s reading interests. 

• • Makes you find new topics

If you have a topic in mind keyword research helps you expand. 

• • Gets you the best listing in search engine

Proper research on keywords can help you to choose low-competition keywords with the highest chance of being listed.

• • Helps you to target the right audience

When you build a website, you need the right traffic to be successful in your business. A good keyword search will help you gain the right audience. 

• • Gives you life skills

Learning about the dynamics of researching keywords can never go in vain. All these topics you’re learning are going to help you throughout the journey of your life. Once you learn to find the right keyword, you can employ it for any website or business.

 

How to do Keyword Research for SEO?

Now that we have understood what keywords are, let’s learn how to do Keyword research. 

Firstly, understand that you can look for keywords in all those places where people do searches – 

•  Google

 It is the most commonly used search engine by people to search for queries online. Google search provides actively searched queries that can help you to get the most targeted keywords. 

 

For example, let’s say for a search query “simple pasta recipes” you get a  list of suggestions by Google search engine. You can use these keywords to align it with your blogs, if the content is good there is a chance to rank in the top position. 

Let’s also know about Google’s LSI keywords (Latent Semantic Indexing)  which help to deeply understand the content on the webpage. LSI  keywords are texts or phrases closely related to your search topic. 

For example, imagine that you just published a blog about “Ice-cream recipes”. 

Google will not only scan your page to find the term “Ice-cream recipes” in your title tag and your content; but it will also scan your page for terms like  (“Ice”, “cold”, “milk”, and “cream”, “dessert”). 

When they find all these related keywords in your content, they believe that this page is about the topic of ice-cream recipes.

A recent Google Research Paper says that semantically-related terms help to determine a page’s topic. 

•   YouTube 

YouTube is not a search engine, but if it was a search engine it would rank 2nd most popular search engine after Google. Billions of hours of videos are watched on YouTube every day, so many people go to YouTube to get an idea about what kind of content is being searched for and consumed. 

 

•  Quora

Forums where people post a question and hold discussions are the best sources to discover “long-tail keywords”. You can search for the term – “Keyword Research” and check how many questions have been listed out by people who are seeking answers to their questions. You can list these questions and discover “long-tail keywords”. 

 

•  Google Keyword Planner

It is a free tool that allows you to discover important keywords and find data for keywords like estimated monthly search numbers, competition, and ad pricing.

 

Usually, this tool is used by marketers to identify keywords for their running ads, but you can discover the right keywords by using this amazing tool. 

Paid tools like Ahref, SEMrush, Keyword Insights, Keyword Everywhere, etc are available in the market and are actively used by people to find out keywords, keyword trends, and content ideas. 

 

• Competitor Research

 This is one of the underrated forms of research in digital marketing, but the most powerful tactic is to find relevant opportunities by researching their competitors. There are tools that allow spying on your competitor and their keywords.

 

Conclusion 

Keyword Research is an essential part of digital marketing and search engine optimization. It helps you understand what works and what doesn’t.  

“Keywords can either make or break a successful business” Use of the above-mentioned tricks can help you find potential keywords.

 

 

We all know that search engines like Google, Bing, or Yahoo are serving millions of users per day who are looking for answers to their questions or for solutions to their problems. Google alone has more than 3.5 billion searches per day. If you want your website to rank higher in Google searches you will need to play by Google’s rules and need to learn how to improve the SEO of your website. Top Google rankings are a pinnacle of online business prosperity.

As per the latest survey, the first result on Google gets 31.7 percent of all clicks while results on the second page receive just 0.78 percent of clicks. One of the best ways to ensure that you are making maximum use of your content is by improving your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts. This article will focus on how to improve the SEO of your website on Google searches.

 

What is SEO and Why is it important?

SEO can be understood as a set of rules for optimizing your website so that it can achieve higher rankings in search engine organic results. Website SEO is the process to follow to increase the visibility of your website in search engines and get more traffic.

SEO is important for online business because it can keep you at a higher place on Google search, it improves the usability of a website, it helps in increasing your website’s trust among users, and it also helps to put you ahead of your competitors. If you have a website, blog, or online store, SEO can help you get free targeted traffic from search engines.

 

Tips to improve the SEO of your website

Follow these suggestions to improve your SEO or improve your Google search ranking for your website:

1. Understand the Google ranking algorithm

To improve Google search ranking it is very important to know the Google algorithm. Google is a platform that constantly changes its algorithm and most of these changes aren’t publicly announced. Google usually shares major update announcements but the exact inner workings of the algorithm are still unknown.

The best knowledge we have of Google’s algorithm comes in the form of major updates like the content should be relevant and not copied, mobile compatible websites will get priority, websites should not use unnatural links to boost their rankings, etc.

2. Know your current search ranking

To improve your Google ranking, you should first need to know where you stand. There are many tools like Semrush which help to assess your rank. You can compare your SEO keyword ranking with your competitors here and find out where you have to improve your website’s Google ranking.

3. Improve your page loading speed

Page loading time plays an important role in website SEO tactics. If your website load speed is low your ranking will get harmed as Google will recognize it very quickly. A slow website will also impact the way your website visitors engage with your pages. The latest research shows that 40% of visitors will abandon websites if the page takes longer than 3 seconds to load. So, it is extremely important to optimize both your page speed and server response time.

4. Create your content around a Primary keyword and relevant Secondary keywords

Understanding what keywords are best for your target audience and content type can help you build a strong content strategy to boost SEO. Your content should be written in such a way that it flows naturally. Primary and secondary keywords should naturally come up in your content so that you don’t have to stuff your content forcefully.

5. Improve site navigation

Search engines reward sites that provide a positive user experience. If site visitors cannot find what they are looking for, they will most likely leave your site. This will impact your bounce rate, time that visitors spend on your website, number of pages they view, and ultimately it impacts your search engine rankings.

To avoid this, keep your website easy to navigate. Developing a clear navigational structure will help visitors find what they are looking for in your site. The rule of thumb for navigation is to never make a page more than 3 clicks away.

6. Optimize your website for mobile devices

One of the important SEO tips is to optimize your website for mobile devices. That’s because over 60% of Google searches are coming from mobile devices. Google recognizes this aspect and ranks websites accordingly. If your site isn’t optimized for mobile devices, it’ll hinder the user experience, adversely affecting your Google ranking.

7. Expand your Backlink portfolio

A big part of SEO strategy deals with backlinks and whether you are generating backlinks from high-authority sites. Backlinks increase the credibility of your website. All of your data claims should be linked to trustworthy and authoritative sources. A diverse backlink portfolio tells Google that your site is an authoritative source and that you are generating links in a natural way.

8. Use effective header tags

Using effective header tags helps search engines understand your content better. Headers let search engines know what your content is about, and if you insert proper keywords into headers, the search engines will have an even better understanding of your content.

If your site is just a wall of text, it’s going to discourage people from spending a long time on it. Headers make everything look more appealing, which is always beneficial. By using effective header tags in your content people will love to read your content and spend more time on it, and subsequently, your SEO ranking will rise.

9. Optimize images

Optimizing images on your website is a good SEO strategy. Huge images can slow down your page loading time and will ultimately hurt your ranking. Resize or compress your images to optimize them. Image optimization helps your content rank higher on Google image search while also improving your site’s visibility.

10. Use clean URLs and Meta descriptions

Your URLs should be clean, focused, and optimized to get most of the search engine ranking results. Your URL should also include the keyword or keywords you are targeting. Meta descriptions must also be optimized to improve the SEO of your website. Keep them concise, clear, and unique.