Getting your own business website made is an amazing feat. It is a sure shot way to give your business the much needed boost, especially if it is a new business and running on a small scale. You want to capture the attention of as many people as you possibly can to make sure your business is recognized. But, what is the point if people do not know of your existence in the first place? Your website needs to appear in the pages of search engines. People must know that you have come up with an official website for your business. The internet is a global platform and you may not realize it but getting a global audience is an amazing thing and it can do wonders for your business. So if you wish to increase the visibility of your website, an XML sitemap is a must.
XML sitemap may raise a plethora of questions in the minds of people. To put it simply, an XML sitemap is nothing but a list of URLs that you wish the search engines to know exist. It is that simple and straightforward; not to mention extremely effective. There is no easier logic than this. Your search engine needs to find the website that you are the official owner of. For obvious reasons, if your search engine is unable to locate your website on the internet, your prospects will not either. This is a risky game as you may lose your audience to your competitors.
The greatest advantage of getting an XML sitemap is that the search engines will include all the extra information that you want your audiences to have. You sitemap has the ability of including each and every URL that is important from your site. How is this beneficial? There is a possibility that a search engine may not include certain pages from your website as a search result. However, it may be important from the traffic point of view. When you have an XML sitemap, it includes these pages that the search engine does not.
You can also include a page in XML sitemap on the basis of priority.
This is one of the best features of the XML sitemap. If you feel that a particular page needs more priority, you can include that page first. This, however, is an optional tag. It helps the user to determine how important a particular page is compared to the other pages. The search engines crawl websites based on the priority information. You can include this tag anywhere in the Sitemap depending on your choice and preferences and your main concerns.
When you are making your website official, it is important that you feed as much information to search engines as possible. For this purpose, there are two additional tags; lastmod and changefreq. These optional tags are responsible for transferring more information to the search engines that crawl your website. This gives your site an upper hand over other sites that are over the internet. lastmod tag tells the search engine when the web page was last modified and changefrq tells it the number of times the web pages are likely to be changed. When you send across extra and vital information, it is definitely going to result in better visibility of the web pages in the search engines. An XML sitemap is an excellent way to boost the performance of your website.
