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August 8, 2023

Today we wanted to get into the subject of sitemap because we have been discussing increasingly sophisticated methods to enhance the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) of your dealer website. This is a more sophisticated tactic, so we’re addressing it in a different blog article.

More and more dealerships are optimizing their websites for search engines as knowledge of SEO spreads. As a result, it is much more difficult to win against the competition because the playing field is already level.

Reading this post could seem daunting if you aren’t familiar with web programming and coding. Because so few use XML sitemaps effectively, this information can boost your dealership website’s SEO and give you a real edge over competitors. Before we dive in, let’s review a few key phrases.

Sitemap

A sitemap serves as a crucial tool for website owners because it shows which pages exist and where they are located. This is especially useful if any of your redirect links or 404 errors fail. You must fix page faults and indexation issues as soon as you discover them, since they degrade your site’s overall quality, hurt your SEO and search engine rankings, and may irritate your visitors.

This is what you submit to Google: an XML sitemap. An XML sitemap lists the most crucial pages on your dealer website, helping search engines find and crawl each one more easily. You must do this if you want Google to understand the layout of your website.

Website crawling is a computer process that looks up content on websites. Like a browser, it will index the pages and content you want to store. Your SEO will benefit more from making your website easier for crawlers to access.

One of the most underused SEO strategies is using XML sitemaps. You should start submitting an XML sitemap to Google right away if you haven’t already. You can index your pages quickly and gain an advantage over other dealerships that avoid this process. In this article, we’ll go through how to create a sitemap, how to optimize your website for one, how to use robots.txt files, and how to submit a sitemap to Google.

Establishing a Sitemap

It’s possible that your supplier has already created a sitemap for you if you use a well-known Content Management System (CMS) for your website. SimpSocial creates sitemaps for each of the websites.

If you don’t already have one, start creating one by following the guidelines at sitemaps.org. Make sure to include a URL for your sitemap on your website.

Here are some fundamental guidelines for building your sitemap:

Because an XML sitemap is the format that is primarily for search engines, we strongly recommend utilizing one.

Be consistent in the URLs you use. For instance, instead of listing our URLs as “www.SimpSocial.com/” (missing “https://”) or “https://SimpSocial.com/” (missing “www”), we would display them as “https://www.SimpSocial.com/” (missing “https://”).

Make sure your sitemap includes fewer than 50,000 URLs, as required.

Improving Your Website

It is crucial to remember that whether Google decides to index your pages or not will depend on the quality of both your site as a whole and each individual page. As a result, we advise that you eliminate any low-quality or infrequently seen pages from your website. Merge the information from the pages you deleted onto the ones you currently have.

Make sure your pages are loaded correctly and swiftly, because a slow website may point to coding faults or other problems. A website’s SEO rankings suffer when it loads too slowly.

The Robots.txt File

Due to the fact that many dealership websites already have this section on the /robots.txt files, we are including it here. You can skip this part if you don’t use a /robots.txt file or aren’t interested in it.

The /robots.txt file instructs web robots about their website. A Robot looks for a /robots.txt file whenever it visits a website. They will examine the content if there is one. Due to the ability to instruct web robots not to index particular pages on your site, users may employ /robots.txt files. To prevent misleading search engines, if you are utilizing the /robots.txt file, make sure it is consistent with your XML sitemap.

Adding Your Sitemap to Google

It’s time to submit your XML sitemap to Google once it has been created. Find your sitemap’s URL, then use Google’s Sitemaps tool to submit it.

Visit Google’s Search Console Help for Further Details

Although this content may seem difficult, it needn’t be. We are pleased to help you if you need any assistance or have any problems following along. We create sitemaps for each of our websites at SimpSocial. To quickly index your sites, we will create an XML sitemap for you and submit it to Google. To begin, give us a call or send an email right now.

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