What Are The Best Ways To Optimise XML Sitemaps?
- 4 January, 2021
- Jason Ferry
- SEO Company
SEO companies and businesses know the importance of optimising their websites, and a big part of doing just that is dealing with XML sitemaps. Therefore, the best SEO companies and website owners should create and update their XML sitemaps by using the best practices in the industry.
Search engines use XML sitemaps to get information about the pages and structures of a website. XML sitemaps contain important meta data, such as the last time pages were changed, how often they are updated, and their relationship to other pages. Here are the top ways for an online business to optimise their XML sitemaps:
- Tools and plugins
SEO companies and website owners can use tools and plugins, such as an auditing software designed with an XML sitemap generator, to generate their XML sitemaps automatically. They can also manually create their sitemap simply by following the XML sitemap code structure.
Sitemaps do not necessarily have to be in XML format. SEOs and webmasters can make use of text files with a new line to separate every link. However, when it comes to implementing hreflang attributes, they must generate complete XML sitemaps, and the best way to do this is to use tools and plugins.
- Submit sitemaps to Google
Webmasters and SEO experts can also use Google Search Console to submit their sitemaps to Google. From the dashboard, locate the Crawl button. Click Sitemaps, then Add Test Sitemap. From there, you can test your sitemaps and look for errors that can cause problems when indexing key landing pages. Once you’re sure that everything works fine, click Submit Sitemap.
By submitting sitemaps to Google, you can help search engines understand how a website is structured. Moreover, this helps you discover any potential errors and fix them so that the search engine can index the page properly.
Professionals also advise website owners to submit sitemaps from high-quality pages, but there is no guarantee that all of them will be indexed. The most desirable result is for all pages submitted to be indexed.
- Choose high-quality pages
The quality of a website is one of the ranking factors that can boost a brand’s visibility on the search engine results pages. Sitemaps that lead bots to thousands of low-quality web pages will tell search engines that the website is of low-quality as well – something that people do not want to visit. This is also applicable on login pages.
What SEOs and website owners can do in this case is to direct bots to the important pages of their websites. These pages should be highly optimised, contain unique and relevant content – as well as videos and images – and prompt readers to comment and write reviews.
- Determine indexation problems
As mentioned before, not all of the submitted webpages will be indexed on Search Console, and this frustrates many SEOs and webmasters because this does not tell them which pages are problematic. This is especially problematic for ecommerce websites. For instance, out of 20,000 pages, only 15,000 are indexed, and Google Search Console does not say which 5,000 pages have issues.
The best way for SEOs to isolate the problem is to split those pages into different XML sitemaps and test them separately. Once they have determined the issues, SEOs have two choices: either fix the problem or set the pages to “noindex”.
Working on sitemaps can be a huge undertaking, especially if you do not have the time to take care of it yourself. This is why many businesses online hire only the best SEO companies in the industry to deal with XML sitemaps in the most efficient way possible.
Here at Position1SEO, we have a team of experts who have years of experience in the SEO industry. We make sure that your web pages are fully optimised so that the search engines will see that your website is relevant to the searchers’ queries.
If you want to work with the experts, call us today on 0141 404 7515 or send an email to office@position1seo.co.uk.
