Sitemaps are a standardized way of telling search engines which pages they should crawl.
How useful are they? My own experience is that for content-oriented websites and blogs, sitemaps are an efficient way to get known by search engines.
For each post I write here, I tend to welcome readers through Google search about 10 days after the posting date. As a consequence I believe sitemaps are an interesting asset to give your future readers a better user experience while trying to reach you.
What does a sitemap look like?
Basically an XML file with URLs in it:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<url>
<loc>http://blog.logeek.fr/2008/1/19/a-beginner-s-guide-to-datawarehouse</loc>
<lastmod>2008-01-21T03:23:05+00:00</lastmod>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
<priority>0.5</priority>
</url>
.... more urls ....
</urlset>If you manage or create a website, you can generate the sitemap yourself or use an existing tool. Most blogging engines provide a way to generate sitemaps either natively or through a plugin.
How to use the sitemap once you have one?
There are a couple of ways to tell search engines that you are using a sitemap.
One option is to declare it in your robots.txt file. Another option is to push the sitemap location to the search engines directly — if you have a new website I believe this option will help you spread the word.
Where to submit the sitemap location? Most of the big search engines support sitemaps:
- Google Search Console
- Bing Webmaster Tools
One last tip: have a look at how your pages look like once indexed using the site:mysite.com Google query. What you get should be easy to read and understand to help people looking for content find what they need.