

The importance of sitemaps is utmost for large websites with many webpages, new websites that have few backlinks, websites that feature lots of rich content like media, and websites that are not structured properly. Also, if you make any changes to your website like add new pages, delete some pages, and so on, search engines can easily discover this using sitemaps, which makes the indexing process faster. Sitemap shares meta data such as the type of content located at some links (video, audio, etc.), the age appropriateness of such content, and a lot more. A sitemap helps the search engines index such pages too. For instance, search engines may not be able to find some of your webpages, because they are not linked to other pages on your website. Sitemap is one of the most useful and powerful tools for your website. This makes it extremely easy for the search engines to crawl your website entirely. You create a single XML file, which captures the complete structure of your website – lists URLs to all of your website’s pages, displays the links between them, and even shares meta data of your webpages with the search engines. Sitemap, as the name indicates, is a map of your website. Your website’s subject authority is one of the most important metrics used by search engines to decide your page rankings. With more pages indexed, you are perceived to be a stronger authority on the topic by search engines. Search engines think that as the wealth of content on any subject increases on your website, you are a good authority on the respective topic. To ensure that you reach maximum audience, make sure that the search engines have indexed all the webpages that you want your audience to see. The Indexed Pages section gives you a legend of the total number of webpages indexed by the major search engines. After going through all the efforts of creating webpages, and performing on-page optimizations, if the search engine users cannot find your webpages, what’s the point of it? Search engine users will be able to find your webpages only if they are indexed. It is important that all the customer-facing pages are indexed by the major search engines. Your website may contain a few pages, a few hundred pages, or thousands of them.

Therefore, meta descriptions continue to be relevant indirectly for your search engine rankings. Also, if your meta descriptions are on point, then your click-through rate will also improve. If your readers find relevant content in meta descriptions, more of them will click on your link in the results page, which improves your relevance for the respective search keywords. Also, the text in them should be designed for the readers and not for the search engines. A good description is not too long, because search engines only display meta descriptions up to a certain word limit on the results page. Therefore, they continue to be relevant and useful. But, most of the search engine users glance at the meta description content before they click on the links. Search engines have stopped directly using meta descriptions in their rankings.

Meta descriptions appear right below the clickable links in the search engine results, which are meta title tags, by the way. Meta Descriptions provide a concise summary of your webpage content to the search engine users.
