6 Reasons Generating an XML Sitemap Can Help Your SEO

1. Generating an XML Sitemap via a site crawl mechanism can show up spidering issues, especially spider traps, 404 errors or parts of the site that are not accessible.

2. Looking at the XML Sitemap generated from a site crawl can show up duplicate content issues with URLs such as / and non-slash versions of directories being available.

3. When you have submitted the Sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools, it will tell you how many pages from the Sitemap it has got indexed. This can be very interesting information, letting you know how well indexed the site is for the pages you have told it about in the XML sitemap.

4. Compare the number of pages indexed in Google Webmaster Tools with the number in a site: command – a site: may show up more, and this needs investigation as to why there is a difference – do you have duplicate content or orphaned pages? Are search results pages getting indexed? Is Google crawling parts of the site it shouldn’t using form submissions or drop downs?

5. For big sites, the amount of pages in the XML Sitemap might be your best estimate of how many pages you have… use this information to your advantage when checking number of pages indexed by different engines.

6. If you have non-dynamic site, or one that generates a “real” last updated date, then Googlebot does use this information to see if it should revisit a page. This is good for getting old pages crawled that you have made changes to, that otherwise it might take weeks to get around to.

Most of these points are related to site integrity issues, and these are an often overlooked part of on-page SEO. Sometimes, fixing on-page factors is like waving a magic wand, and immediate SEO results can be astonishing. Sometimes, all the on-page changes in the world are not going to help rankings much, because it is all about the site authority. Every SEO project is different, and that is part of what makes this job interesting!