Be in the Know
- The NFL in 4K HDR gets off to a rocky start on Fox Sports.
- Apple is considering using its iconic logo as a notification light.
- GoodRx is coming for subscription prescription services.
- Spotify is finally getting Siri support with iOS 13.
Why You Need to Have a Sitemap
It’s SEO Monday!
Today, we’re talking about sitemaps. Ready to get schooled?
What the heck is a sitemap?
A sitemap guides visitors through your website. Example: Let’s say you can’t find what you’re looking for in the main navigation of a site. Where do you go? Probably to the link-filled footer of the page.
From a marketing standpoint, sitemaps help your users efficiently navigate your website.
From an SEO standpoint, sitemaps help search engines discover you.
Here are 2 sitemaps to familiarize yourself with:
- XML sitemaps: These help search engines and spiders discover the pages on your website. XML sitemaps are great for large websites with a lot of pages.
- HTML sitemaps: HTML sitemaps are a clickable list of pages on a website.
Now that you know what sitemaps are, let’s chat through a few reasons to use them.
- Organization: Inevitably, your website will grow. It’s important to keep things organized to avoid confusion for visitors. To get started with this step, fire up a Google or Excel sheet and list every page on your website.
- Speed: When your website is organized with an HTML sitemap, it helps speed up the search engine crawlers by spotlighting your most important pages.
- Increase visibility: We all want to be found, right? An HTML sitemap will assist bots (website crawlers) in verifying that your website links make sense. Why does that matter? If your site makes sense to the bots, they’ll crawl it for longer and in turn, increase your rankings.
Takeaway: There’s a lot to unpack with sitemaps. Our suggestion is to start simple. If you don’t have XML or HTML sitemaps, use the tools featured below to get on the right track. 👇
Sitemap Tools
Assuming you’re using WordPress, here’s what we recommend for sitemap tools:
Yoast SEO: Features a ton of SEO solutions including an XML sitemap feature.
Simple Sitemap: Just like the name says, it’s simple. Simple Sitemap will add a good ol’ fashioned HTML sitemap directly to your site without any coding or setup.
Watch
The Hoff
Don’t hassle the HOFF.
David Hasselhoff, the 80s icon and drunken burger champ (Google it) is back.
Enjoy the Hoff in the German ad spot for AI-powered mopeds.
