To those of you who are new in this world of digital marketing, Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the process of increasing your website visibility in various search engines. In layman’s language, an SEO Analyst makes sure that your website pops up on the first page of the search engine every time someone is looking for something relevant. Think about it, how many times have you bothered to go to the second page to find something? None, right? Yep, trust us when we say that no one does. An inside joke of the best SEO company in Kolkata is that we can hide a dead body there. Guaranteed, no one will go looking over there.
Now, jokes apart, did you know that there are two ways for SEO optimization: on-page and off-page? Any optimization that you make inside the website itself is on-page SEO. On the other hand, any optimization that you make outside the website is called off-page SEO. In this blog, we will be discussing one of the easiest and best on-page optimizing tricks- creating an XML Sitemap.
What Does The Best SEO Company In Kolkata Say About Sitemap?
XML Sitemaps are an indispensable way to boost up your website ranking. They are easy to create and easier to link to the website. All you need is the answer to 3 W’s- What, Where and Why.
WHAT Is an XML Sitemap?
First things first, what is this ‘XML Sitemap’? Not getting into any ‘so-called’ technical jargon, a Sitemap is a list. Oh! And if you are wondering, XML is a computer markup language like HTML and CSS. The Sitemap is written in XML and therefore, called an ‘XML Sitemap’. Now, what does this list comprise of? All the important pages of the website. Important is a relative term but roughly, any page that needs to be crawled should be listed. How do you create it? You don’t; several free websites will create it for you, all you need to do is input the main URL of the website. The best SEO company in Kolkata has listed below 3 such websites:
- Screaming Frog
- Free Sitemap Generator
- XML Sitemap Generator
All of the above-mentioned websites are free.
WHERE Do You Put The Sitemap?
You have downloaded the Sitemap, what do you do next? As the first step, you need to insert it into the c-panel (in the hosting) of your website. Ask your website developer to help you with this step. Once it had been uploaded in the c-panel, you need to submit it to Google Search Console through your account. Again, another free tool created by Google. Any company providing SEO services in Kolkata will be able to tell you how important it is to connect your website with Google Search Console. It helps get ranking much faster.
Lastly, Why Is An XML Sitemap So Important? Answered By The Best SEO Company In Kolkata
Understand the fundamental function of ‘Googlebot’ first. It is website crawling software that is used by Google to visit and collect documents (crawl) from all websites on the Internet. A crawler will visit your website in specific intervals of time, crawl all the pages, go through all the changes and report it back to Google
(indexing). It is this crawler which decides the ranking for any given keyword. As you can understand, it is a hefty amount of work (an understatement) but needs to be done every single day. Now, imagine if you can make this work a little bit easier for the poor crawlers. An XML Sitemap does exactly that and makes it easier for the crawler to do this job by telling it the essential pages that need to be crawled. In return, the Googlebot favors the website (obviously) and its ranking increases.
Viola! A single step and you have managed to make Google happy and have been rewarded.