A sitemap is a file that contains a list of many web pages that are contained in a single website. It is used to tell search engines about the site content and how it is organized. Web crawlers used by search engines will read the file in order to gain more knowledge about the website, and crawl it more effectively. The sitemap will also provide very valuable metadata that is associated with the web pages that are listed on the sitemap. Metadata is data about the webpage—this would include information like how often the web page is changed, when it was last updated, and its importance in relation to the other pages in the website.

In the process of optimizing websites, an extremely important part of the puzzle is submitting the sitemap. The purpose of the sitemap is to ensure that search engines will discover all pages contained on the website, and will download them quickly when changes have been made. Here, you will discover more about why sitemaps are important, how to optimize them for search engines, and when to use an XML sitemap and RSS or Atom feed.

As a whole, Google News works to promote online journalism, and allow users to be exposed to many diverse perspectives. In this process, there are no humans that are choosing which stories receive top placements and which ones will be declined placement at all. The factors that determine where an article will rank on Google News are: the diversity of content, the originality of the content, rich textual content, and how fresh the content is. Additionally, there are technical factors that may affect the ranking of an article in Google News. These factors are: other relevant sites that link to your article, as well as accurate and descriptive title and alternate tags in the code for the news articles.

Extensions for sitemaps are an added syntax for certain media types that are contained within a sitemap. These media types would be images, videos, and other hard to break down content that is contained within the site, and the extensions are used to improve its indexing. A byproduct of the improved indexing, the sitemap extensions will provide information from tags on the elements to aid in making the website more accessible. In short, the extensions are used for content that is not just simply words or text in a default language.

Quite a few years ago Google announced the availability of annotations for websites that would target users in other languages as well as users that were physically in other countries. These invitations are representative of a conglomerate of quibbling pages that are aimed at users around the world. They were also implemented by using rel-alternate-hreflang linking elements in the HTML code of each page contained in the cluster. There is also support for specifying these hreflang annotations within the site map.