Explore the SEO Benefits of Customized Dynamic XML Sitemaps!

The subject of sitemaps comes up often in my monthly meetings with SEO clients, and since Google has recently changed it’s requirements of XML sitemaps, I thought I’d talk a little bit about the importance of XML sitemaps and what you can do ensure that you are using your sitemap to its full potential!

What is an XML Sitemap?

An XML sitemap is a step above the basic HTML sitemap that is generally included in a well-designed website. What is the difference? The HTML sitemap is an actual page on a site containing links to the website’s major pages, which a visitor might use to navigate when they can’t find a specific page right away. Search engines also use the HTML sitemap to determine which links are available to spider and index. However, an HTML sitemap is only a general guide, and often does not contain all links available to spider in a website. This is often the case in a website that contains dynamically generated pages (shopping carts, etc). The XML sitemap is a ‘behind the scenes’ map of all links in a site, uploaded to the root directory of a website, invisible to visitors and accessible to all major search engines (as of this writing, XML sitemaps are now supported by Google, Yahoo and MSN).

An XML sitemap allows web crawlers to easily navigate and access top and deep level links throughout your site. In the case of new websites, an XML sitemap acts as a ‘lighthouse’ for search engines, enabling them to ‘see’ the site and index your site much more quickly and thoroughly than simply waiting for the crawlers to find the site on their own, with no map.

Why should I customize my XML site map?

XML sitemaps are highly customizable and enhance your web presence by informing Google and other major search engines of in-depth information about the pages on your site that a basic HTML sitemap can’t provide, such as:

• The most recent date and time a page was last modified
• The frequency with which individual pages on your website change.
• A comprehensive list of a website’s URLs that may not be easily spidered by the search engines
• The relative importance of individual pages on your site in relation to each other.

You can improve the search engine performance of your website by including a customized XML sitemap to ensure that all pages on your site are located by search engine spiders. If your site is Flash-heavy or contains image-based or JavaScript navigation, an XML sitemap is especially critical, as search engines have trouble spidering such sites. Also, if your site contains a lot of archived content that is hard to find or isn’t properly linked internally throughout the site, an XML map can help with making sure these pages are found and indexed.

Implement Dynamically-Generated XML Sitemap for Optimum Web Presence!

You also have the option of taking the next step with sitemaps by including a dynamically-generated XML sitemap on your site. If your site has a database, implementing a dynamic XML sitemap allows you to not only customize each URL of the sitemap, but also ensures that new links are added to the sitemap immediately without you or your site admin having to do so. This is especially handy with sites having hundreds to thousands of URLS. We all know search engines love fresh and up to date content-by providing them with your newest links on a regular basis, you are definitely encouraging frequent spidering and indexing!  A detailed sitemap can also help increase long-tail conversions of your keywords and phrases.

Google is now giving ‘strong hints’ in its Webmaster Tools that including the ‘relative importance’ of individual pages in your sitemaps is a good idea. You can easily identify the importance of pages in a static sitemap prior to uploading it to the root directory. However, by using a databased dynamic sitemap, you can set top level, category and product page defaults to your desired importance, ensuring that all new links include an appropriate rating automatically.

For example, your home page might have a relative importance of 1.0, category pages have an importance of 0.8, and individual blog entries or product pages have an importance of 0.5. This priority ranking only indicates the importance of a particular URL relative to other URLs on your site, and has no direct impact the ranking of your pages in search results. However, by indicating the importance of relative pages and their frequency of change, you are giving the search engines information that influences how often they come back to a site and in what order they should move through your site’s URLs for more accurate indexing.

Take Control of Your SEO with a Customized Sitemap

Whether you include a dynamic or static sitemap on your website, by doing so you are rising to a new level of involvement and capability in the search engine optimization of your website. You will be keeping up with the most up-to-date SEO standards and ensuring that your site’s content is as accessible as possible to both the search engines and your valued customers and clients!

Share this: