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
Sitemap generator
Important Steps for Creating Your Sitemap
Jul 11, 2019 by Kristien Matelski Search Engine Optimization Vizion Interactive So, you’ve got your domain, your website, and have populated it with several pages. Now, you need a sitemap – but what is a sitemap? How do you create one? If you’ve never heard of a sitemap or are unsure of how to get started, researching sitemaps can be rough and frustrating. It’s best to take it slow and don’t rush your learning or your process; this will help you do things right and stay well-organized. Take your time to read every help article and step-by-step instruction thoroughly to soak up all the information.What Is a Sitemap?The basics of a sitemap are simple: it’s a list of all the pages on a website depicted by the extensible markup language (XML), which displays the information on the site. These lists of pages aid in search engine optimization (SEO) and are a requirement for some search engines in order to add your URL to their database.These sitemaps may … [Read more...] about Important Steps for Creating Your Sitemap
XML Sitemaps Are Not All That
A few days ago, I found lurking in my inbox an email bearing the ominous news that the Google sitemap file for one of the sites I manage was "missing." Oh, dear! The email then helpfully offered a company's services to generate a sitemap for me, even directing me to a page on the company's site that would explain just what this allegedly incredibly complex code is and why I supposedly need one. Being a curious sort, I visited the site. Clearly I must be in the wrong business. These folks charge hundreds of dollars to generate a sitemap for you. They charge separately for creating a "Google sitemap" and a "Yahoo sitemap" (nearly $400 if you want both). And they want five to 10 business days to get the file(s) back to you! All this, when sitemaps.org spells out the XML file schema for a sitemap so you can create one yourself -- for free. I've looked at it; it isn't that complicated. Tedious to code manually, particularly if you have a large site? Absolutely, without a doubt. Probably … [Read more...] about XML Sitemaps Are Not All That
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
The Importance Of XML Sitemaps In The Age Of Panda
In the early days of search engines, I wasn’t much of a believer in XML sitemaps. But over time, I began to see first hand how they can benefit websites. XML sitemaps serve as a way to communicate directly with the search engines, alerting them to new or changed content very quickly and helping to ensure that the content is indexed faster. For content publishers, it’s become critical to help Google specifically understand if your site is the original publisher of content. Why? Panda. Content Syndication, Duplicate Content & Panda It’s not uncommon for publishers to syndicate their content on other websites. Further, it’s also not uncommon for publishers to have their site’s content “curated” by other websites without a formal syndication agreement. Unfortunately, the definition of content curation is fuzzy at best. In a quick Google search for a recent Search Engine Land article, I found over 47 copies of the article on other sites. … [Read more...] about The Importance Of XML Sitemaps In The Age Of Panda