In my first weeks at Atlassian, I was seeking for a quick-win to get a stronger foothold within the company and evangelize SEO. So, I audited our main site and noticed it didn’t have an XML sitemap. What an easy win! I went to the devs and asked them to activate it in the CMS. To my surprise, they told me that it wasn’t possible; I was baffled. After some thinking, I remembered that Screaming Frog had an XML sitemap function, so I scraped the site and uploaded the crawl as an XML sitemap. Google ate it within a few seconds, and we saw a noticeable impact on our traffic in the following days. The moral of the story is that XML sitemaps are important and sometimes underrated. What XML Sitemaps Are and Why You Need to Have One XML sitemaps are digital maps that help Google discover important pages on your site and how often they are being updated. Google states on its help center page: A sitemap tells the crawler which files you think are important in your site, and also … [Read more...] about The Best XML Sitemap Tools, Tips, and Tricks
Image xml sitemap
Reorganizing XML Sitemaps with Python for Fun & Profit
One of the main benefits of combining programming and SEO skills is that you can find clever solutions that would be difficult to see if you only know SEO or programming separately.For instance, tracking the indexing of your most important pages is a crucial SEO task.If they are not being indexed, you need to know the reason and take action. The best part is that we can learn all this for free directly from Google Search Console.In the screenshot above, the XML sitemaps are grouped by page type, but the four sitemaps listed here are specifically used to track the progress of some SEO A/B tests we ran for this client.In the Index Coverage reports, we can check each sitemap, learn which specific pages are not indexed, why they are not indexed, and get a sense of how to fix them (if they can be fixed).The remainder of this post will cover how to reorganize your XML sitemaps using any criteria that can help you isolate indexing problems on pages you care about.Table of … [Read more...] about Reorganizing XML Sitemaps with Python for Fun & Profit
How to Update Sitemaps After You Change Your Content
Editor’s note: “Ask an SEO” is a weekly column by technical SEO expert Jenny Halasz. Come up with your hardest SEO question and fill out our form. You might see your answer in the next #AskanSEO post!Welcome to another edition of Ask an SEO! Today, we’ve got a question from Emilee in Ohio. She asks:I was wondering, in the case of sitemaps. Say, I were to delete or combine a few pages, should I resubmit a sitemap to the relevant Webmaster Tools, or is it OK to just update the human-readable page onsite? I’m wondering if it’s sufficient enough for GoogleBot to crawl in terms of updating for SERPs as well when doing a site:example.com search for pages that are indexed to gain an understanding of what pages haven’t been crawled.XML sitemaps are a service that Google offers to SEO professionals. They aren’t required, and sites don’t rank any better/worse as a result of using them or not using them.Therefore, if you change … [Read more...] about How to Update Sitemaps After You Change Your Content
5 Website Tips To Keep Your Brand Image Fresh
As the old saying goes, you never get a second chance to make a first impression, and your website is no exception. To ensure that your site creates a positive impression, you need to keep it well maintained. Considering that a website is one of the most important marketing tools, marketers should be mindful that even small site issues can quickly add up and adversely affect brand perception. For instance, a poorly organized product website can frustrate users and negatively impact sales. Similarly, an informational website with stale content can drive users to get their information elsewhere. In short, a poorly maintained website spells risk for your brand. Though I wish they were a rarity, poorly maintained websites are anything but. In fact, you’ve probably been a victim of one yourself—I know I have. For example, I recently went online to buy a pair of boots. Because I knew exactly what I wanted, I went directly to the manufacturer’s website. Fortunately, I found … [Read more...] about 5 Website Tips To Keep Your Brand Image Fresh
A Primer On How To Get The Most Out Of Sitemaps
Search crawlers are becoming more and more effective every day in discovering new content pages on websites. But, that process of organic discovery can be slow and spotty, so it’s hardly any solace to sites that publish hundreds of new pages a day, or publish extremely time-sensitive content such as news articles, or publish a huge amount of specialized digital media content such as video. Even with the continuing improvements in organic search for discovering your content, it still takes time for search to find it all. It takes patience on your part, and in many cases, the content found in a crawl has inadequate context to the needed, relevant keywords that make it discoverable to searchers. Wouldn’t it be cool if a webmaster could just identify a list of content pages you wanted the search engines to crawl, telling them “these are the most important content pages on my site,” and in some cases, even offering a little bit of keyword context to it? Well, great … [Read more...] about A Primer On How To Get The Most Out Of Sitemaps