Categories: On Page Optimization
An XML Sitemap is a list of the pages on your website written using the XML protocol. By submitting an XML sitemap to a search engine the search engine spiders will come to know about all the pages on that website, including any pages that would go un-detected during its normal crawling activity.
XML sitemap acts as a route map for the search spiders to let them find what you want indexed on your website.
Every webpage that doesn’t have a link from your website (Isolated/Orphaned pages) can also be indexed by search spiders, if they are written down in the XML sitemaps.
An up-to-date sitemap.xml file will ensure every web page on your website is listed on search engines with the latest content.
There are a number of free online tools that can automatically generate a sitemap.xml file for you.
Sitemaps are classified into two; the first one found physically on websites themselves assist users of a site to navigate the site. The second, ‘XML Sitemaps’, usually called Sitemap with a capital “S”, are used by Search Engines to easily locate and gather web pages and information for indexing the site.
Search Engines use your Sitemap to learn about the structure of your site and to increase the coverage of your web pages. A well-designed sitemap allows for search engines to easily locate and index all relevant pages of a website.
Sitemaps should be easy to find for a search engine, ideally be placed at the root level directory as this gives the page better visibility. Links to the sitemap page should ideally be provided from all web pages in a website.
Creating and submitting a Sitemap helps make sure Google and the other search engines know about all the pages on your website.
Meta tags are HTML or XHTML elements used to provide structured metadata about a web page placed in the head section. Meta tags can be used to specify page description, keywords and any other Meta data not provided through the other head elements and attributes of a web page.
Let’s discuss about the Meta tags that are important from a search engine optimization perspective.
Meta description tag and the Meta keywords tag
Meta description tag is intended to give a description about what the page speaks about. This information normally would show under search results for that webpage if listed in a search engine.
Eg:
Meta name=”description” content=”Honda car dealership nationwide”
Meta keywords tag allows the webmaster to lay down a few keywords that would ideally act as an indicator to the search engines to know what the page speaks about. Search engines assume that the page is focused on and created for users who might search for information with the keywords that are present in this section.
Eg:
Meta name=”keywords” content=”Honda, car dealership, Honda cars”
Meta tags have varying levels of relevancy in different search engines. Search Engine like Google doesn’t rely on Meta Tags anymore to assign pager ranks, as they feel Meta tags are being misused and stuffed with keywords by webmasters to beat competition.
Although the relevancy of meta tags has vastly decreased and other Search engine Optimization techniques has gained importance, adding meta tags would always give a slight push to your website to race ahead of the competition to land your site on top of search engine indexes.
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