How To Use XML Sitemaps To Boost SEO
What was considered best practice yesterday does not hold true today and this is especially relevant when it comes to XML sitemaps, which are almost as old as SEO itself.
The problem is, it’s time-consuming to sort valuable advice from all the misinformation on forums and social media about how to optimize XML sitemaps
So, while most of us recognize the importance of submitting sitemaps to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, as well as in the robots.txt file – for faster content discovery and refresh, more efficient crawling of SEO-relevant pages, and valuable indexing reporting to identify SEO issues – the finer details of implementing sitemaps to improve SEO performance may be missed.
Let’s clear up the confusion and dive into the current best practices for sitemap optimization.
In this article, we cover:
- What is an XML sitemap?
- How to create a sitemap.
- Valid XML sitemap format.
- Types of sitemaps.
- Optimization of XML sitemaps.
- XML sitemap best practice checklist.
What Is An XML Sitemap?
An XML sitemap is a file that lists all of your website’s URLs.
It acts as a roadmap to tell the crawlers of indexing platforms (like search engines, but also large language models (LLMs)) what content is available and how to reach it.
In the example above, a search engine will find all nine pages in a sitemap with one visit to the XML sitemap file.
On the website, it will have to jump through five internal links on five pages to find page 9.
This ability of XML sitemaps to assist crawlers in faster indexing is especially important for websites that:
- Have thousands of pages and/or a deep website architecture.
- Frequently add new pages.
- Frequently change the content of existing pages.
- Suffer from weak internal linking and orphan pages.
- Lack of a strong external link profile.
Even though indexing platforms could technically find your URLs without it, by including pages in an XML sitemap, you’re indicating that you consider them to be quality landing pages.
And while there is no guarantee that an XML sitemap will get your pages crawled faster, let alone indexed or ranked, submitting one certainly increases your chances.
How To Create A Sitemap
There are two ways to create a sitemap: Static sitemaps that must be manually updated, or dynamic sitemaps that are updated in real-time or by a regular cron job.
Static sitemaps are simple to create using a tool such as Screaming Frog.
The problem is that as soon as you create or remove a page, your sitemap is outdated. If you modify the content of a page, the sitemap won’t automatically update the lastmod tag.
So, unless you love manually creating and uploading sitemaps for every single change, it’s best to avoid static sitemaps.
Dynamic XML sitemaps, on the other hand, are automatically updated by your server to reflect relevant website changes.
To create a dynamic XML sitemap you can do one of the following:
- Ask your developer to code a custom script, being sure to provide clear specifications.
- Use a dynamic sitemap generator tool.
- Install a plugin for your content management system (CMS), for example, Yoast plugin for WordPress.
Your sitemap needs three items to introduce itself to indexing platforms:
- XML Version Declaration: Specifies the file type to inform indexing platforms what they can expect from the file.
- UTF-8 Encoding: Ensures all the characters used can be understood.
- Specify The Namespace: Communicates what rules the sitemap follows. Most sitemaps use the “http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9” namespace to show that the file conforms to standards set by sitemaps.org.
This is followed by a URL container for each page. In a standard XML sitemap, there are only two tags that should be included for a URL:
- Loc (a.k.a. Location) Tag: This compulsory tag contains the absolute, canonical version of the URL location. It should accurately reflect your site protocol (http or https) and if you have chosen to include or exclude www.
- Lastmod (a.k.a. Last Modified) Tag: An optional but highly recommended tag to communicate the date and time the page was published or the last meaningful change. This helps indexing platforms understand which pages have fresh content and prioritize them for crawling.
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