You cannot guarantee the returns of your digital marketing without investing in the optimization of your website. The website is after all the crown of all your online marketing efforts. Without optimizing it for search engines, few people looking for products and services online will come across it no matter how good it is. Website search engine optimization for your business in Virginia is unfortunately not as straightforward as online articles will have you believe.
Without a digital marketing agency, it is a huge challenge to get anywhere near the top spot of search engine results pages. One of the elements on your website that eases its indexing by search engines and makes it easy for online clients to view your content is a sitemap. Here are the sitemap options that you have for your website:
HTML Sitemaps
These are generally useful for your website’s visitors. They help your visitors navigate the web pages on your site since they are types of web pages where your website’s entire structure is provided. To boost the impact of an HTML sitemap for your search engine ranking, you can add CSS to your map. The sitemaps are also linked to your website’s footers and improve your keyword ranking by linking your internal web pages.
XML Sitemaps
These are designed for search engines to crawl your website and index your content to get the ranking of your website. An XML sitemap is invisible to your clients and will store information in formats understandable to search engines. There are two primary classifications of XML sitemaps: image and video sitemaps. These make indexing of your images and videos easy for search engines since visual content is one of the highest-ranking aspects for websites nowadays. Without the right sitemap, however, they will become the weak point of your entire website.
XML Sitemap Index
Image and video sitemaps used on most websites have some limitations. Their uncompressed file size should be 50 Mb at most, and the maximum number of URLs that you can use is 50,000. These will limit their use for a large website. These sites can combine multiple XML sitemaps into one XML sitemap file index. This is basically a sitemap for all your sitemaps.
Google News Sitemaps
These are only used on websites registered with Google News. In this option, it is best to include only articles that you have published within the last 48 hours and that use a maximum of 1,000 URLs per sitemap. You should also update your Google News sitemap as soon as you post a new article. Unfortunately, this sitemap will not support image URLs.
It will be mostly overwhelming for you to pick a sitemap that works for your site’s SEO rank from the above. Your choice will determine your website design and other elements throughout your site. Hence, you should have your website professionally designed to ensure that the sitemap used will work for your bottom line. Moreover, your preferred sitemap will change over time as you grow depending on your content and other elements. To this end, your contract with the best digital marketing agency will be a long-term one to ensure that your sitemap works through different changes on your website.
