Why You Need to Update Your Sitemap Regularly

Websites have become leading information sources in the world. Actually, that is one of the leading reasons why people spend hours behind their personal computers researching, laughing at jokes, sharing stories online, making purchases, reading reviews, and even playing games. This content is constantly updated on the site, but the only way search engines can learn about their existence is through natural crawling by bots, which might take weeks. This is why many people have tried to learn and understand how to create sitemaps, which is actually just a step towards the right direction, because there is more.

Having a sitemap is a milestone only about 50% of website owners have managed to achieve, the rest still rely on fate to land search engines bots on their sites. However, what matters after a sitemap has been created is constant updates; sitemaps must be updated frequently, just the same way content has to be kept fresh at all times for various reasons.

Efficient Indexing

When you regularly update your sitemaps, it speeds up the indexing process. Most website owners do not update their sitemaps even though they have updated their websites. Not updating your website is not wise because the search engines will not be notified that some new content has been added to the site and therefore require their attention. This way, the new content will be indexed and will make it to the SERPs faster than relying on the natural indexing process that is unpredictable.

Increases the scope of visibility

When many pages are indexed, it increases the scope of online visibility. Obviously, more content means more use of keywords which will result in keyword-rich website ideal for better ranking. Upon learning how to create sitemaps the next important step should be to create as much content as possible for enhanced visibility on the web.

Influence Crawling Frequency

Search engines prefer websites that are active. This is based on the frequency on which content is updated on the site. If you are amongst those who update their websites and sitemaps regularly then the search engines know that you are an active content provider. Therefore, you end up entertaining bots from time to time.

How frequently should it be done?

The sitemap should be updated as often as your content is. However, you can use a sitemap creator to do the bulk of the work. Some sitemap plugins will automatically update the sitemap for you whenever fresh content is updated.

Update all the sitemaps

Both the HTML and the XML sitemaps must be updated regularly because they serve different functions. This is important because your visitors will find it easy to trace new content on the website with the aid of the HTML sitemap while the search engines will use the XML sitemaps to find and index new pages. Ideally, a website should have at least one fresh page or piece of content, but if you are busy, you can try and publish one. Thereafter, update the sitemaps respectively and stay on the top of the chasing lot in SERPs.