Why is it important to review your site map for any errors? Well, errors on a sitemap can negatively impact your SEO activities. A sitemap is a map for crawlers, and signals to the search engine robots that there are pages to be crawled and where they can be found.

When revising a sitemap there are numerous errors that can be identified including:

• Pages that have been moved, removed, or changed since the first upload of the sitemap. These need to be added to the sitemap to have your sitemap correspond with your website and decrease the confusion of the crawlers.
• Checking the sitemap for URLs that are not allowed. Sitemaps can be sensitive when it comes to URLs and will not accept URLs that have a higher directory level than the sitemap, or URLs that do not have the same domain name.
• The dates will be checked as sitemaps have a specific format for the last modified dates, and it can only be one of the two formats:
  • 2013-08-12
  • 2013-08-12T1 9:00:25 + 00:00
• The verification file needs to be double checked including the naming of the file, as the location of the file.
• Checking tag values and making sure that they do not contain invalid values.

These are just a handful of errors that can cause a sitemap to be rejected by search engines or slow down the crawl of a search engine robot. Just like any map, it is essential that the route be carefully planned, measured, revised, and resized for accuracy or else there could be mayhem on the way!

Search Engine Optimization explained.

Keyword Assessment | Meta Data | Webmaster Tools | Google Analytics | Monthly Reporting | Robots.txt | .htaccess | Favicon | Site Map | Search Engines | Google Maps | Forms and E-mails | Footer Link | Google Search Engine | Picture Tagging | Directory Page | Social Media | Heading Tags | Indexed Pages | Robots | Sitemap | HTML Errors | Search Engine Errors | Broken Links | Pages and Content | Search Engines | Picture Tagging | Flash and iFrames | Hierarchy | Forms and Emails | Add Media | Static URLs | Descriptive URLs | Duplicate Content | Plagiarism Check | Positive Content | Negative Content | Character Coding | Downloadable Files | Optimize Graphics | Optimize Navigation | Incoming Links | Outgoing Links | Page Content | Meta Data | Rich Content | Reduce Bounce Rate | Social Media | Analyze Competitors | Website Security | 3rd Party Tracking