How to scale your search engine visibility with sitemaps?

How to scale your search engine visibility with sitemaps?

One of my topics has been setting up sitemap handling on a hand crafted java webshop. You could think of sitemaps as something like a global register of products your webshop has to offer.

Google and other search engines use this to index your webpage on their side. If you provide this information google can more efficientlty crawl your webpage and deliver better search results to the other end which is actually your potentially paying customers.

Sitemaps the technical part

Technical wise, a sitemap looks something like this

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
   <url>
      <loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>
      <lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod>
      <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
      <priority>0.8</priority>
   </url>
</urlset>

As optimizing the the numbers of customers and implementing a technical problem has two sides to consider, it makes sense to look a bit into both sides of such a problem. The technical side and the seo side.

We could start by cutting this problem down in two parts.

The business part, in wich someone needs to understand the problem from a high level point of view and needs to ensure that the implementation in the second part are done correctly.

The second part or better call it technical part, which focuses on implementing the correct thing in code.

How is it working?

The technical sitemap view above, shows, how to setup a sitemap in an abstract way.

Differentiating

Lets start with some technical things a sitemap is a XML document. Actually lot of the things, everyone of us uses nowadays will involve XML at some point.

But usually you wont see it, at least not in the way a tekki will see it and believe me, there are multiple subtypes of tekkies that have different perceptions of XML as a format to transfer data. One advice from my side, if you have plans for the weekend you better don't start a discussion with one of those subgroups.

The seoguy will usually see the effect of the XML afterwards. After someone changed something within the sitemap, and it stops working like expected. Or when he needs it updated for some reason. Having a discussion with him will usually not start a vim emacs fight. Actually you could have nice discussions about experiments and ideas and also get a more detailed view on how you should e.g. setup your architecture to be future proofed.

For both of them, in the end the sitemap topic is about the data. One of them wants to ensure, that the correct data is transfered to the search engine, and the other one wants to ensure, that the data, that hopefully was transfered correctly, is giving him the right outputs so that he cab adjust his strategy accordingly.

Deep dive

This is meant for those who need a deeper insight on how the sitemap is connected and can be skipped by those who only need a brief overview.

Attribute mapping

If you look into the protocol specification of sitemaps you will find, next to some general specifications like encoding, the structure of the sitemap in an abstract way. Basically you will find the tags that are valid within a sitemap and which you have to care for. You have to ensure, that your sitemap is in the perfect shape, so that the search engine can get a good overview over what your website is about.

Basically a sitemap has, next to the general xml document specifications, a urlset tag which contains all url entries.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
   <url>
      ...
   </url>
</urlset>

The url tag can consist of:

  • loc: The loc to get indexed from the search engine
  • lastmod: The time this was modified the last time
  • changefreq: The likelihood for your loc to change
  • priority: A value between 0 and 1 which is used from the search engine to select the right url on your site.
<url>
  <loc>http://www.example.com/catalog?item=73&amp;desc=vacation_new_zealand</loc>
  <lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod>
  <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
  <priority>0.8</priority>
</url>

You can find more details and further informations about the sitemap protocol on https://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html.

From a technical point of view most of the properties you can set here a pretty clear.

Lets get into detail from a seo technical view.

SEO deep dive

We already talked about SEO in general in this article here. Therefore here we wll have a deeper look on concrete effect of sitemaps here.

Imagine you where a search machine. Your goal would usually be something like finding the best results for the individual which is using you.

In most cases google is the the tool you would use. When you are google, you are in a position where you can form the web. Google is doing this e.g. by updating their rules to get found by them from time to time.

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