XML Site Map

You must constantly keep modifying website content if you want to maintain a higher search engine ranking.

Reason: search engines prioritise listing fresh and useful website content to their users.

XML Site Maps enable search engines to be be alerted when you modify your website content.

When you use an XML Site Map, search engines will add your new web pages to their listings in hours or days rather than weeks or months.

We recommend that you periodically re-submit your XML Site Map to search engines.

Read more: How to submit an XML Site Map to Google.

XML Site Maps let you indicate to search engines which is the most important content in your website, and which pages you want to receive priority attention.

XML Site Maps enable search engines to crawl and index website content more efficiently and more effectively (i.e. faster and sooner!).

Search engines don’t have to crawl your enire website looking for pages.

An XML Site Map will present all your website's menu links in one place and in a format that is search engine friendly.

Without a Site Map it could be months before new content is crawled by search engines.

OSMap enables you to change the order of display by using your mouse or touch pad to drag & drop Menus.

The image below shows two selected Menus.

The Main Menu will be displayed first unless it is dragged down the list.

DEFINITIONS

Priority

Tells search engines which URL you consider more more or less important relative to your website's other URLs.

Change Frequency

Tells search engines how often is the content at the URL is likely to change.

Search engines may crawl URLs more often which you indicate change more frequently.

DISPLAYED MENU SETTINGS

Priority

We select 0.5 for Menus in our own website.

Change Frequency

We select MONTHLY for Menus in our own website.

DISPLAYED MENU LINK SETTINGS

Priority

We select 1.0 for our Blog menu link and 0.5 for other menu links in our own website.

Change Frequency

We select WEEKLY for our Blog menu link and MONTHLY for other menu links in our own website.

How to determine Priority and Change Frequency for Menu Links

Select the Edit Links button displayed next to the Site Map you wish to change settings for.

Click on the image to view a larger version.

Then you can review and change the Priority and Change Frequency for each Menu Link.

If you choose not to do so then the settings you applied to a Menu will be applied to each of its Menu Links.

Click on the image to view a larger version.

OSMap includes two plugins to help you further control how your Site Map is displayed.

We tell you how to open the plugin screen later in this article.

The image below shows the parameters we use in our own website.

In the image below we have circled where we have changed the default settings.