Some people might dismiss sitemaps as one of those useless pages on a website people don’t use. It might be true for websites with sitemaps that contain many pages and links. Others would say there’s a search box anyway where you can type what you’re looking for. The latter saves you the time and effort of combing through the links in a sitemap. Although sitemaps might not be used that often by human visitors, they’re highly useful to website crawlers and robot visitors. These crawlers can impact the SEO ranking of your website and pages. Therefore, you have to take them into account in setting up your sitemap. So if you're considering this, you might want to check out which among the numerous providers has the best sitemap generator. To help you further, here are the different things you ought to consider when you’re setting up your sitemap.
One of the things you have to consider when you create and set up your sitemap is which of the different ways of creating a sitemap to use. Sitemaps play a vital function in search-intensive sites such as eCommerce and news sites.
Your choice of creating and setting up a sitemap will depend on several different factors. Among these factors is the nature of your website, the outcome you have in mind, and the quantity of the content. It’s quite easy to create a sitemap with the help of a sitemap generator.
Here are the different kinds of sitemaps:
Another consideration to keep in mind when setting up your sitemap is linking your sitemap from the homepage. It may not seem that important, but it has a huge impact on how search engine crawlers use your website. Keep in mind that search engines use crawlers to search your site for pages. They then index them based on their quality and ranking. This is one of the most important principles of creating a sitemap that you should remember.
Crawlers search a website for high-quality web pages. They look for new pages and updated pages. However, it will also ignore duplicate pages and low-quality pages. Sitemaps function as a location and routing guide for internet crawlers.
To help internet crawlers make sense of your website and sitemap, you should link your sitemap from the homepage.
Internet crawlers start from the homepage and move down the hierarchy of pages until they crawl all the high-quality pages in your sitemap. By doing this, you will help ensure that crawlers and other search engine robots visit all the web pages of your website.
You should limit the number of pages on your sitemap to just around 200 pages. Search engines place a much higher limit by restricting sitemaps to a file size of 50 MB or not more than 50,000 pages within your sitemap. But this is the upper boundary. Their consideration is more about not overloading your servers with too many sessions when the crawlers start fetching information from your web pages.
If there are too many web pages, the tendency is that your website’s servers might not be able to handle the load. It can lead to expiring sessions or error messages. Another possibility is that search engine crawlers might think your sitemap is a deliberate link farm if there are too many pages in your sitemap.
In terms of SEO planning, it might hurt your strategy if there are too many web pages and links. Too many links will impel you to link beyond three levels deeper into your sitemap. It might make the crawlers think that the pages beyond the third level are merely duplicate pages. Therefore, they may ignore them completely. But if you don’t dig deeper than three levels, it would also impact the aesthetic structure of your sitemap. There will then be too many pages on one level. Thus, will strain the user’s eyes just trying to look for a specific page.
Another vital consideration in creating your sitemap is that you should make sure you don’t include pages that return error messages when search engines request them from your web servers. One of the things that cause frustration among internet users and website visitors is getting a 404-error message. This error message often notifies the user that the web page is unavailable.
It will create the impression that your website is not up-to-date or in frequent use. Most users and visitors will think you don’t take the time to check the status of your web pages. Some will then hastily conclude that you are not maintaining your entire website and thus, is not worth their time. Some people even leave reviews and comments in forums about sites they visit with 404s.
Sitemaps might seem like they’re just the table of contents of a website. Perhaps some internet users don’t even pay attention to the sitemap of websites they frequently visit. But crawlers and other search engine robots use sitemaps to make sense of a website’s contents. They also start from the homepage before going down to the other pages and links on a website. That is why you should know these important things to consider when setting up your sitemap.
