To identify which web page should be displayed for which search result, Google visits websites available online through crawlers and collects relevant data to store it category-wise in the database through indexing.
In order to make Google aware of your website, it is important to ensure that it is discoverable by the crawlers. As per stats, there are over 1.98 billion websites online, so getting discovered by Google can cost a lot in terms of time. Even though the bots are fast, it usually takes a good amount of time to discover new websites.To make this process swifter, SEO companies optimally utilize XML sitemaps.
XML sitemaps act as a guided path for Google to discover the webpages on your website and index them faster amongst a surfeit of websites on the world wide web.
It is crucial to know that XML sitemaps are not the only way to enhance your SEO ranking, it is one of the various practices adopted by SEO agencies to accelerate their SEO results by drawing Google’s attention to the website. Though, at times, one size fits all doesn’t work, therefore submitting different XML sitemaps for different types of content becomes important. Image XML sitemap is the most prominent example in this scenario.
What is an image XML sitemap?
Image XML sitemaps assist Google in identifying the image content on your website. It works on HTML tags and uses syntax to list images. Up to 1000 images per page can be listed using an image XML sitemap when done manually. But does everyone require an image XML sitemap for their website along with the regular one?
Who requires an image XML sitemap?
The answer to this question totally depends on the type of your website. If your website has heavy written content, then including an image XML sitemap might not be important. But, if your website depends on heavy image content, then the use of image sitemaps is paramount.
It is also crucial to analyze from where the majority of traffic is directed to your website, if Google images are one of the sources, then optimizing your image data and making use of image XML sitemaps poses an essential practice.
Image sitemap submission must be optimized by following businesses considering they carry heavy image content:
- E-commerce
- Photographers
- Influencers
- Travel and Tourism
- Hospitality
- Event Management
- Real Estate
Now that we are aware of what image XML sitemaps are and if they are useful for your business, it is crucial to understand why to utilize them.
Why include images in your XML sitemaps?
Content indeed is king but there are certain off-page SEO techniques that assist your on-page work in being discovered by the relevant audience. It is best done when Google can easily crawl and index your web pages. There are certain benefits to including image sitemaps along with submitting your regular XML sitemaps, which are:
Easier for Google to identify image content
It is challenging for Google to identify image content on web pages. Submitting separate image sitemaps resolves that issue and helps crawlers recognize image content.
Google images SERPs
Considering the fact it is harder for Google to identify image content, the utilization of images to enhance your website traffic through higher ranking in the image SERPs is compromised.
With the help of image XML sitemaps, this issue can be resolved, and the SEO agency can reap maximum benefits out of the image content by ensuring greater visibility in the Google images SERPs.
Contextualizes images
Just like Alt-text gives a brief to the viewer regarding the image, image XML sitemaps give a brief regarding the same to the Google crawler. Information such as the location, caption, title, and licensing can be mentioned through an image XML sitemap. This contextualizes the image for google and assists in indexing, which further enhances visibility in the SERPs.
Highlighting important content
For websites with a plethora of pages having many images, submitting image sitemaps is essential as it highlights the web pages that are of utmost importance. This ensures that they are swiftly crawled and indexed.
Conclusion
Manually creating image XML sitemaps can be a tedious task, but it must never be compromised. SEO is a holistic activity with an amalgamation of a lot of practices that must be carried out to yield results. But we understand that it can be overwhelming.
So, #ARM Worldwide extends its helping hand to share some of your burdens. Take your brand to a noteworthy level with the best SEO agency in town. Our team of SEO professionals leaves no stone unturned to help you earn your space in the digital world.Bring your brand the recognition it deserves with services from the best SEO company.
