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The Data Scientist

Sitemaps

How Sitemaps and Internal Linking Help Improve SEO

In today’s digital age, getting your business out there requires more tech-savvy strategies to ensure you actually reach your target audience. From sponsored social media posts that let you target specific demographics to digital out-of-home solutions such as digital signages that display your business’s new product, it’s crucial to utilise technology if you want an advertising strategy that actually yields results.

One such strategy is search engine optimisation (SEO), which improves your business website’s visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs) and prompts more people to visit it. The more eyes you get on your website, the more likely it is that people will know about your brand and potentially purchase your products or avail themselves of your services. 

That being said, establishing an effective SEO strategy is no walk in the park. It requires a combination of techniques and tools that can enhance a website’s content, structure, and authority. Among those tools that can significantly improve your website’s visibility and health are sitemaps and internal linking. Whether you’ve consulted one of the best SEO companies in Singapore or outsourced the work to an external agency, you’ll know that these elements are foundational in ensuring your website is well-structured and easy for search engines to index.

Here’s an overview on both to better understand how they can be used to improve your business website’s SEO.

What Are Sitemaps?

A sitemap is a file (typically in XML format) that contains a list of all the key pages of a website. It guides search engines in discovering and indexing the website’s content, therefore allowing them to gain an accurate understanding of its structure. This allows search engines to determine the relevancy of the site’s content whenever someone searches for a specific keyword.

For instance, imagine you’re an online clothing store with a specific page for your women’s outerwear collection. If that page is listed in your sitemap and was indexed by a search engine, then the search engine is more likely to show that page as a result when a user searches “outerwear for women” due to its high relevance. This subsequently helps you gain more visits and potential sales as your website gains more visibility on the SERPs over time.

How Sitemaps Improve SEO

Sitemaps can be incredibly helpful in supporting your SEO strategy. The following are some ways in which sitemaps can help your website gain more visibility in search engine results:

1. Facilitate Efficient Crawling

Crawling is a process that involves search engine bots (also called crawlers) combing through your site to discover and index its pages. By having a clear and organised sitemap, you can make crawling more efficient and ensure that crawlers are able to properly index all your pages to improve their overall visibility.

2. Highlight Priority Pages

Sitemaps enable you to specify priority pages, thus helping search engines focus on your most important content. For example, you can indicate your homepage as a priority page to increase the likelihood that visitors finding you from search engines results will end up there rather than on some other part of your website.

3. Support for Large or Complex Websites

If your website has hundreds of pages, as is the case with most e-commerce or content-heavy websites, then sitemaps provide a more convenient way for crawlers to index all of them. This ensures that nothing is overlooked and missed, as what usually happens for deep-linked or newer pages.

What Is Internal Linking?

Internal linking refers to hyperlinks that redirect to different pages within the same website. These links help users more conveniently navigate the site and allow search engines to understand the relationships between pages. Internal linking is also crucial in distributing authority (also known as link equity) across the site.

For instance, a home renovation business website will typically have a page showcasing their offered services. It’s highly likely that potential clients will browse this page first to better understand what kind of renovation services the company is capable of. At the end of the services page, the business can then provide a link to their Contact Us page. This internal linking can be convenient to the customer while also functioning as a call to action.

How Internal Linking Improves SEO

In addition to making it more convenient for users to navigate your site, internal linking can also boost your SEO through the following functions.

1. Distributes Link Equity

Link equity (also known as link juice) is the value passed from one page to another through hyperlinks. Internal linking allows you to distribute this value from your high-traffic pages (such as your homepage) to your less prominent pages, which can help improve their search engine rankings.

2. Establishes Content Hierarchy and Context

Linking pages around similar topics signals to search engines that the involved pages are closely relevant to each other. For example, a gym website may have a “Beginner’s Guide to Working Out” page that links to a blog post titled “Top 5 Quick Morning Workouts.” Doing so reinforces that the beginner’s guide is the more comprehensive resource while the workout tips are supplementary information that those coming from the guide may appreciate knowing. This interconnectedness can increase both pages’ chances of ranking well in searches.

3. Supports Keyword Optimisation

You can also use relevant keywords as anchor text—the clickable text in a link—for internal links to provide search engines with a concise idea as to what the linked page contains. This makes it easier for search engines to understand what the linked page is about, improving its chances of ranking high when a user searches for the anchor text.

Sitemaps and internal linking play complementary roles to each other, with sitemaps enabling crawlers to do their job more efficiently and internal links establishing the connection between website pages. This allows you to promote all your pages and make them more accessible, helping your business website improve its search rankings overall and gain more potential customers in the process.