In short, XML sitemaps are a list of URLs of a website. Apart from the URLs, they can provide additional data about a page, like when it was last updated, how often it’s get updated, if a page contains images etc.
XML sitemaps help search engines to crawl your website and find all important pages of your site. Usually crawlers simply follow links on your site to find all content. Implying that if your internal linking structure isn’t flawless, they might miss out on some content. This issue can be prevented with an XML sitemap. If you have an XML sitemap that lists all important URLs of your site, you ensure that crawlers will encounter these URLs.
The Yoast SEO plugin creates an XML sitemap for your site. It also allows you to include certain types of pages or not.
A good XML sitemap is a roadmap to all important pages of a website. This roadmap guides Google to all main content on a website. Having an XML sitemap can be beneficial for SEO, as Google can retrieve essential pages of a website very fast, even if the internal linking of a site isn’t flawless. »
Category: Technical SEO
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 »
Categories: Content SEO, Technical SEO
Your tag and category pages could be very important pages on your site. If you’re using these pages in the right way, they can boost your site’s SEO. You might wonder if you should also include these taxonomy pages in your XML sitemap. In this Ask Yoast we explain whether you should, and why! Our support team received the following question »
Category: Content SEO
We’ve just pushed out a new release of Yoast SEO, our flagship plugin. The new version, 3.5, mostly has a metric ton of small bugfixes. In this post, we’ll discuss the most notable changes, but you should mostly be aware that this is what we would call a bugfix release. XML Sitemap changes We’ve decided to »
Categories: Announcements, Technical SEO, WordPress
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 »
Categories: Content SEO, Technical SEO
Recently, while working on the site for my father in law (in Dutch), I wanted to create an XML sitemap for the many publications on his site, that are downloadable PDF’s. I regularly add PDF’s to his site too, and since I’m a tad bit lazy I don’t want to keep updating the XML sitemap. So »
Category: Development
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 »
Category: WordPress
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 »
Categories: Technical SEO, WordPressWhen you’re developing XML sitemaps, no matter on what platform, it’s pretty hard to debug them sometimes to be proper XML. You have to validate all the time and you can’t do a quick “glance” over to see whether your sitemap has the URL’s you were expecting. As mentioned before I’m working on my WordPress »
Category: Technical SEOUpdate 19-9-2012: I’ve released my own Video SEO plugin for WordPress. Check it out! As mentioned in a previous post, recently I have started playing with Video SEO, and found it to be a part of SEO I quite like. It’s a very technical trade so far, so apologies for all the code in the »
Category: Technical SEO