XML sitemaps help search engines discover and index website pages efficiently, improving visibility in search results. A well-structured sitemap enhances SEO by ensuring all important pages are crawled, especially for large or new websites.

Search Engine Journal contributor Jes Scholz has published an article on  using XML sitemaps to boost SEO performance.

She says, “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.

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.”

How To Use XML Sitemaps To Boost SEO

Search Engine Journal

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