Search Engine Optimization or SEO constitutes many parts, and each part is more complex than the other. Your websites need to be ranked by search engines to enjoy higher traffic, sales, and conversions. For this to happen, the search engines must crawl and index your websites through the bots (robots).
These bots or robots assess whether your website is informative, relevant, and usable for search engine users. This assessment ascertains if it delivers the desired results and then ranks the website according to its findings. This process ensures that the bots have all the necessary data that they need for your target audience to read and engage, The robots.txt tag and an XML sitemap are the two relevant aspects for this whole process to happen successfully.
Sitemap.XML file
The XML sitemap charts everything present on your website from the very beginning to the last. This helps search engines rank your website more efficiently and accurately. The XML sitemap is a type of website document that states every content on your website and how it can be reached. Additionally, it also provides information about the last time web pages were updated.
The XML sitemap acts like a roadmap for your site dictating which parts of your website are important. When you look at this, it is like a comprised snapshot of your website. This helps the search engine to crawl and index your website faster and improve your SEO rankings.
Purpose:
XML sitemaps are strictly for the search engine bots to crawl and index the contents of your website properly and influence your rankings. The sitemap.XML tag effectively alerts the search engines when to create, update, and hold back from the contents of your website. It is an important SEO strategy and is practised by all SEO service providers. It is especially effective and comes in handy when your website has numerous large web pages on your site.
Placement:
You can place the sitemap.XML tag on any dedicated URL of your website. It is mostly used by SEO excerpts and web developers to check the website’s health and coding.
Benefits:
The sitemap.XML tag helps in boosting the SEO rankings by directing the search engine bots.
It is the roadmap of your website that leads search engine bots to crawl and index your website accurately.
The SEO agencies use this file to check the website’s SEO health and then strategize to improve it.
Robots.txt tag
The robots.txt tag directs the search engine bots to which areas to crawl and which do not. It is a very essential part of the crawling process or directive by following a strict syntax. Every business website includes this tag on its website to benefit its SEO. It is the first tag that usually a bot looks for while stepping foot on your site.
Purpose:
The purpose of using this tag is to narrate to the search engines which URLs are allowed to index and which are to be not on any given website. It is essential for website owners if they include a robots.txt tag on their site for optimization.
Placement:
The robots.txt tag can always be placed at the root of the website domain.
Benefits:
The robots.txt file can help block the search engines from crawling the problematic areas of your website and from downgrading your optimization results.
As this tag will prevent the bots from entering certain areas of your site, you have the opportunity to edit those areas and then allow them to crawl. This way, the SEO rankings are not hampered.
Conclusion
The robots.txt tag and the sitemap.XML file are the backbones of a successful search engine crawling and indexing process. They both allow websites to have optimized rankings and effectively help the users to engage. They are the two most effective and common practices for optimization considered by the SEO service providers in India or anywhere in the world. They both can make a major impact on your SEO through its results.