Thu Jan 10 17:02:59 PST 2019

To encourage webmasters to create sites and content in accessible ways,
each of the major search engines have built support and guidance-focused
services
Each provides varying levels of value to search marketers, but all
of them are worthy of understanding
These tools provide data points and
opportunities for exchanging information with the engines that are not
provided anywhere else

The sections below explain the common interactive elements that each of the major search engines
support and identify why they are useful
There are enough details on each of these elements to
warrant their own articles, but for the purposes of this guide, only the most crucial and valuable
components will be discussed



Sitemaps are a tool that enable you to give hints to the search engines
on how they can crawl your website
You can read the full details of
the protocols at Sitemaps
org
In addition, you can build your own
sitemaps at XML-Sitemaps
com
Sitemaps come in three varieties:
XML
Extensible Markup Language (Recommended Format)
This is the most widely accepted format for sitemaps
It is
extremely easy for search engines to parse and can be
produced by a plethora of sitemap generators
Additionally, it
allows for the most granular control of page parameters

Relatively large file sizes
Since XML requires an open tag and
a close tag around each element, files sizes can get very large

RSS
Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary
Easy to maintain
RSS sitemaps can easily be coded to
automatically update when new content is added

Harder to manage
Although RSS is a dialect of XML, it is
actually much harder to manage due to its updating
properties

Txt
Text File
Extremely easy
The text sitemap format is one URL per line
up to 50,000 lines

Does not provide the ability to add meta data to pages