If you’re working for an agency, they should be able to do this for you, too. Remember, the sitemap lives on that server - so someone has to make sure it’s on there. Your support team usually gets involved too, assuming you’re using your own servers or some servers that IT controls. The Technical TeamĪ team of developers will then build an sitemap.xml file based on the structure defined by the marketing team. Which pages need to link to one another? Should site visitors be able to get from the “About Us” page directly to the product page, for example? Whether they define the structure using a visual site map in PowerPoint or some other tool is up to them. This marketing department is usually responsible for defining the structure of the site. Typically, the teams involved in structuring a website’s sitemap are the marketing team, a technical team (whether that’s a team of developers or an agency), the IT team (or whoever controls your servers), and the legal team. Engage Your Marketing, Tech, IT, and Legal Teams So, how do you structure your website’s XML sitemap? Let’s dive right in. Mobile Sitemaps optimize website content for mobile phones that don’t use native web browsers, which automatically produce web content in mobile form.News Sitemaps describe your website’s news content so it’s more easily indexed in search results like Google News.Video Sitemaps classify video content so that it ranks well in Google Videos results, as well as rich snippets in organic results.Image Sitemaps structure a website’s image content so that it ranks well in Google Images results.There are four major types of XML sitemaps you can create, each dedicated to a different type of media you might publish to your website: Here’s an example of what an XML sitemap file might look like:įor this reason, an XML sitemap is a crucial component of a blog, where article pages are constantly bumped further back into the website’s archive as new content is published. XML sitemaps are designed specifically for search engines like Google, which need to be able to find webpages anchored within a website no matter how old or deeply nested they might be in that website’s domain. They’re useful for the internal planning process, but it’s the XML sitemaps that are relevant to SEO best practices. Visual sitemaps, on the other hand, are abstract sketches of your website’s structure, like the one below of Google’s website. You might be thinking to yourself, “But I thought sitemaps were more visual, like a web.” That’s a visual sitemap, as opposed to an XML sitemap - the latter is what we’ve been talking about so far. Along with boosting search engine optimization (SEO), sitemaps can also help define a site’s navigation scheme so you avoid internal linking issues. It’s kind of like a floor plan for the site, which comes in handy whenever the site gets changed. People create sitemaps when they first design their website, add pages to it, and/or redesign it. Your sitemap helps search engine web crawlers understand how your website is built so they can evaluate and rank it more easily. What is a sitemap?Ī sitemap is a file of code that lives on your web server and lists all of the relevant URLs your website is carrying. If you want to launch a website that Google (and your potential customers) can discover, you’ll need a sitemap. You wouldn’t design a new kitchen without creating a blueprint first, would you? So, why would you design a website without creating a sitemap?
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