Introduction
An XML sitemap is an important tool for SEO, even if most users don’t notice it. It acts like a map of your website, highlighting all the unique pages visitors can reach, from the homepage to lesser-known subpages. After launching your site, one of the first steps you should take is submitting your sitemap to Google through the Search Console. This notifies Google that your site is live, provides a list of your public pages, and gives them a way to find updates or new content.
Determining And Comprehending The Sitemap Priority
In simpler terms, sitemap priority is like a popularity contest for your website’s pages. You rank each page from most important (1.0) to least important (0.0). This helps search engines understand which pages are the most valuable to your visitors, so they can show those pages first in search results. Think of it as a way to guide search engines towards the best parts of your website.
The scale usually looks like this:
- 0 – 0.3: This includes old news posts, outdated guides, and irrelevant pages that you prefer not to delete, merge, or update.
- 0.4 – 0.7: This range covers articles, blog posts, category pages, FAQs, and system pages, which make up most of your site’s content.
- 0.8 – 1.0: This level represents the most important content, such as your homepage, key category pages, product pages, and subdomain indexes.
Recognizing The Change Frequency
Frequency tags are like a schedule for search engines. They tell them how often you expect to update your website’s content. For example, if you set a “daily” frequency, you’re telling search engines to come back every day to check for new information. Even though Google doesn’t use frequency tags, other search engines might still pay attention to them. So, it’s important to set realistic frequencies to avoid confusing these search engines and help them understand how often your website changes.
Changefreq can have one of seven attributes:
- Always: The page is constantly updated with important information, like a subreddit index, stock market data, or a major news site’s homepage.
- Hourly: The page gets updated about every hour, commonly seen on major news sites, weather sites, or active forums.
- Daily: The page is updated once a day on average, typical for small forums, classified ads, daily newspapers, or daily blog homepages.
- Weekly: The page is updated roughly once a week. This applies to product information pages, small blogs, and website directories.
- Monthly: The page is updated around once a month, such as category pages, evergreen guides, and FAQs.
- Yearly: The page is rarely updated, maybe once or twice a year. This includes static pages like registration, About, and privacy policy pages.
- Never: The page is never updated, often old blog posts, news stories, or completely static pages.
Balancing Sitemap Frequency And Sitemap Priority
Sitemap tags are like traffic signs for search engines. They help guide search engines to the most important parts of your website and tell them how often you update your content. This can help search engines find and index new information more quickly. For websites with lots of pages, using these tags can be especially helpful. They can help search engines prioritise which pages to crawl and index, so you can make sure your most important content is visible in search results. Remember to update your sitemap regularly to keep search engines informed about any changes you’ve made to your website. This will help ensure your website stays up-to-date in search results.
