How to Improve Website Traffic with Sitemap

Website traffic is one of the key metrics to determine the performance of an organization’s digital assets. Selecting content topics wisely, inserting the right keywords and having easy and short URLs, among best SEO practices.

Having a sitemap is another way of boosting website rank on SERP. By generic definition, Sitemaps are XML (Extensible Markup Language) files that contain a list of all your webpages and their locations.

Some XML Sitemap benefits include deciding:

• The priority of your pages
• The frequency of page changes
• Modified dates

SEO benefits of Sitemaps lead to a better visibility of your website on Google. a better understanding of page hierarchy and linking.

There are two kinds of sitemaps: HTML and XML. HTML sitemaps are written for humans and the latter for search engines. An XML sitemap is specially written for search engine spiders and HTML sitemap enables human users to discover a page on a site that they are looking for.

CMS like Drupal have always given priority to SEO and have tools that exclusively focus on boosting the website ranking on SERP. As Sitemap plays a significant role in improving website rank, Drupal has some easy-to-use tolls that automatically generate sitemap for a website according to the entries made by users. The image below demonstrates an example of how a sitemap can be accessed by crawlers and bots such as Googlebot:

To support active usage of sitemaps in websites, Drupal offers modules like Simple XML Sitemap and XML Sitemap.

Simple XML Sitemap module is an advanced XML sitemap generator. It was brought specifically to be compliant with Drupal 8 and 9’s OOP architecture. It creates hreflang sitemaps and image sitemaps which cohere with the present Google standards. In addition, this module also complies with the latest multilingual sitemap standards.

To setup your website with this module, you just need to install it and select the option to let it index the pages you create with your Drupal site’s content types.

XML Sitemap module is an older, but robust option offered by drupal. This module is coherent with the Sitemaps.org guidelines. The module also comes with several submodules that can add sitemap links for content, menu items, taxonomy terms, and user profiles in your Drupal site.

Based on the output one needs, the sitemap can be easily setup by configuring the submodules of this module.

Search engines prefer to prioritize websites with lower crawl time, and submitting the sitemap of your website aids exactly in that. The images below illustrates how the presence of sitemap affect crawl time on popular search engines Google and Yahoo:

Conclusion

XML sitemap file acts as a guide and tells Google about the important pages. It is not just the website that Google ranks but also the individual pages that make up a website. From the point of view of website manager, it is an effective way of understanding the pages which need your attention, thus channelizing your efforts in the right direction of improving the Google rank of your website.