XML sitemaps can generate higher rankings. Here we explain what they are, how they benefit your SEO and how to use them well.
If your site has a great structure, you wouldn't need an XML sitemap. It does help Google though, to find all URLs listed on a page!
An XML sitemap helps crawlers find and index your content. Yoast SEO has a built-in XML sitemap generated. We've greatly simplified the way you use, setup and maintain this sitemap. Now we're asking you a simple question: Show this content in search results?
An SEO Basics post about technical SEO might seem like a contradiction in terms. Nevertheless, some basic knowledge about the more technical side of SEO can mean the difference between a high ranking site and a site that doesn’t rank at all. Technical SEO isn’t easy, but here we’ll explain – in layman’s language – …
Read: "What is technical SEO? 8 technical aspects everyone should know"
Before a search engine can rank a page or a post, it needs to index it. A crawler must discover a piece of content before it can evaluate if it is a valuable addition to its index. One of the ways crawlers discover pages, is by crawling XML sitemaps. After a page has been indexed, …
Read: "Indexing in Yoast SEO: Show x in search results?"
A good XML sitemap acts as a roadmap of your website which leads Google to all your important pages. XML sitemaps can be good for SEO, as they allow Google to quickly find your essential website pages, even if your internal linking isn’t perfect. This post explains what they are and how they help you …
Read: "What is an XML sitemap and why should you have one?"
On March 6, we released a major update of our Yoast SEO plugin. This update was aimed at making SEO easier and more understandable for our users. We removed quite a few settings and options. In other cases, we changed the names of settings making them easier to understand for non-technical users. All in all, …
Read: "Why we changed so many things in the 7.0 update"
Fact: if your website is set up the right way, you shouldn’t need an XML sitemap at all. You shouldn’t need to think about your category’s XML sitemaps or about including images in your post’s XML sitemap. But why do we keep talking about them like it’s the most important thing ever for SEO? It’s an almost daily …
Read: "The sense and nonsense of XML sitemaps"
Your tag and category pages could be very important pages on your site. If you use these pages right, they can boost your site’s SEO. They can make great landing pages that could also prevent your individual pages from competing. You may wonder if you should also include these taxonomy pages in your XML sitemap. In this Ask …
Read: "Include taxonomies in XML sitemap?"This week we had a few interesting things happening, from a potential update to some new features and an important change in Google Suggest. Let’s dive in! Google adds disambiguation to Suggest In a very interesting move this week, Google added disambiguation results to their suggest box, basically forcing you to choose for a specific topic …
Read: "Let’s disambiguate!"
So you’ve made the decision and want to migrate from All In One SEO Pack to our Yoast SEO plugin. It seems some people are afraid of taking the big leap. It’s actually fairly easy although it will be partly manual work. You won’t have to rewrite the title or description for any of your posts …
Read: "Migrating from All In One SEO Pack to Yoast SEO"
An HTML sitemap (as opposed to an XML sitemap) is often mentioned as being useful for SEO. They certainly are if you use them wisely (and especially Bing seems to like them at times), but I like them even more for the fact that users like them a lot. There’s plenty of plugins out there …
Read: "HTML Sitemap for WordPress"