A Tour to Sitemaps at Simplilearn
Introduction to SEO
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a process that enables a website or piece of content to rank higher on Google Search. Since search is one of the primary ways people discover online content, ranking higher in search engines is essential to increase traffic to a website.
The SEO process includes six general phases:
- Research includes business research, competitor analysis, current state assessment, and keyword searching
- Planning and strategy involves making decisions on handling content, building links to the website, managing social media presence, and technical implementation strategies
- Implementation of optimizing decisions on a site’s webpage
- Monitoring the activity of web crawlers, traffic, search engine rankings, and other metrics observed for producing assessment reports
- Assessment involves checking the summarized effects of the strategy (and its implementation) against the SEO stated targets
- Maintenance is managing minor or significant problems with the website’s operation handled as they arise (e.g., new content that needs optimization according to the strategy)
The SEO process primarily targets organic links. One of the most important aspects of SEO is indexing that is made possible via robots.txt and sitemaps for the website. Let’s jump in and understand what these are and what role they play in SEO.
Introduction to robots.txt
Robots.txt is a text file created by designers to guide search engines and bots for crawling their sites. It contains the list of URLs that you want to allow or disallow for crawlers visiting your website. Whenever a bot wants to access the website, it checks the robots.txt file and accesses only those URLs that are permitted.
Purpose of robots.txt file:
The most important purpose of robots.txt file is that it tells search engine crawlers which URLs the crawler can access on the site. This is used mainly to avoid overloading your site with requests. Moreover, it also specifies the location of the sitemap.
Introduction to Sitemap
A sitemap is a blueprint of your website that helps search engines find, crawl, and index all of your website’s content. Sitemaps also tell search engines which pages on your site are most important.
Why are Sitemaps Important?
- They act as a roadmap for Google and other search engines to find and understand your content.
- Leads search engines through the website to crawl and index the essential pages.
- Helps crawlers identify when new pages and updates to old pages are available.
- Helps search engines find alternate language versions of the page.
There are four main types of sitemaps:
- Page Sitemap: This is by far the most common type of sitemap. It’s usually in the form of an XML sitemap that links to different pages on the website.
- Video Sitemap: This is used to help Google understand video content on the website.
- News Sitemap: Helps Google find content on sites that are approved for Google News.
- Image Sitemap: Helps Google find all of the images hosted on the website.
Let’s look at real-time insights and reports from the Simplilearn website to understand the impact of implementing sitemaps on traffic.
Sitemaps at Simplilearn: A Case Study
We’ve added sitemaps to enable search engines to find, crawl and index our pages. Our daily update runs include the cron job fetching the URLs and creating the sitemaps. Let’s look closely at some of the common Sitemaps on our website:
1. Main Sitemap: Includes URLs of all the active and indexed product pages.
2. City Sitemap: Includes URLs of all the active and indexed city pages of the products. We have 3 types of city sitemaps-
- City sitemap for India- Includes the Indian city pages.
- City sitemap for US- Includes the city pages of a US country.
- City sitemap for ROW- Includes the city pages of ROW(Rest of the World).
3. FRS Sitemap: Includes URLs of all the active and indexed resources like-Article, Ebook, Webinar, Tutorials
4.SkillUp sitemap-Includes URLs of all the active and indexed skill up/free courses.
5.Image sitemap- Includes all the images added to the Simplilearn website.
6.Video sitemap-Includes all the videos added to the Simplilearn website.
Impact of introducing city sitemap in Simplilearn
Introducing sitemaps has proved to be a success on Simplilearn. As an example the positive impact resulting from introducing the city sitemap is listed below:
Clicks improved by: 9.04%
Impressions improved by: 21%
Ranking position improved by: 5%
Top city pages have seen a significant improvement after the introduction of city sitemaps.
Summing Up
A sitemap is an essential part of a website in terms of design, SEO, and navigation. With the growing need for indexing and search engines developing better crawling algorithms, sitemaps are a must for a well-defined user experience. This is why we at Simplilearn always focus on Sitemaps. They play an important role to increase the organic traffic to our website.
We hope our blog helped you understand the importance of Sitemaps. If you have any questions, please feel free to drop them in the comments and we will get back to you. Stay tuned for more SEO-related blogs from us.
If you wish to learn more about SEO, link building, Sitemaps & keyword research then check out our certification course “Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Training Course” available on our website.
