Enhance Search Engine Optimization with ServiceNow SiteMap Generator

You’ve probably heard a hundred times that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a vital digital marketing tool. But do you really know how SEO works? Even if you have a basic understanding of what it entails, you may still not have a solid grasp of this complex and multifaceted process.

SEO is made up of multiple elements and knowing what they are and how they work is key to understanding why SEO is so important. Search engines are incredibly smart today. However, we have a lot of content that resembles its neighbours, and to be sure our customers have the best experience, we want the search engines to be as effective as possible.

In short, SEO is crucial because it makes your web pages more visible, and that means more traffic and more opportunities to convert prospects into customers.

For organizations having public-facing service portals, there is often a need to have public content indexed, or crawled, by search engines for users to find relevant articles quickly and easily. Building a sitemap is one way of improving SEO by essentially announcing a given list of links that search crawlers should visit.

Portals typically refer to sites like landing pages which aim to draw an audience to the main website and generate leads. Portal pages often have the same content creation, optimization, and publication template. SEO portals are a combination of portal pages and SEO automation. An SEO portal is a content-creation tool where users can generate content from a central location and schedule for automated posting.

In an SEO portal, sitemaps can be used to analyze and optimize the structure and content of a website. Using sitemaps, an SEO portal can identify broken links, duplicate content, and missing pages. The portal can then provide recommendations on how to fix these issues and improve the overall SEO performance of the website.

Additionally, sitemaps can help an SEO portal monitor a website’s performance over time. By tracking changes to the sitemap, the portal can detect new pages or changes to existing pages and ensure that search engines properly index them. This can help website owners stay on top of their SEO efforts and adjust to maintain or improve their search rankings.

With Tokyo release, ServiceNow has introduced a new feature to enhance Search Engine Optimization for the service portal pages using the Sitemap Generator. The Sitemap Generator application allows admin users to define and automatically generate XML sitemaps to improve search engine optimization of their publicly accessible portals, including all public article pages, and help portal users find the information they need.

Read our blog where we discuss the ServiceNow Tokyo Release in detail.

Install Sitemap Generator application (sn_ux_seo_sitemap) by requesting it from the ServiceNow Store.

The sitemap is generated from a script or static XML. When creating a sitemap, you must ensure that its contents meet the following requirements because validating them is not handled automatically:

• Includes only pages with unauthenticated user access.
• Excludes pages that respond with a 301 redirect.
• Excludes pages with the NOINDEX meta tag, such as retired or expired pages. If you use a script to create the sitemap, include logic like that of the SEO script include you used to add NOINDEX meta tags to pages to exclude those pages from the sitemap.
• For any pages with canonical URLs or hreflang tags, the sitemap includes those canonical URLs or URLs with hreflang tags returned by the SEO script include for that page. If you use a script to create the sitemap, include logic like that of the SEO script include you used to return canonical URLs or URLs with hreflang tags.

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• Create XML sitemaps for web crawlers to index your public portal pages and improve SEO for your portals.
• Automatically regenerate sitemaps daily based on any active sitemap definitions.

• Add SEO information to portal pages, such as meta tags that improve the searchability of Service Portal pages.
• SiteMap Generator offers two types of Sitemap Definition- define the contents of the sitemap by either a script or by specifying static URL elements.
• You can create multiple sitemap definitions with any combination of types that combine to create the sitemap. For example, you could include both static XML and dynamic content from a script or you could include content from multiple scripts.
• If a sitemap contains over 5,000 URL elements, a sitemap index file that specifies the URLs of the sitemap pages is generated. The sitemap index file is named sitemap-.xml and the sitemap pages are named sitemap–.xml.
• Copy Sitemap URL and add the sitemap URL in Google Search Console.

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Access the sitemap by URL or downloadable files. You can provide the URL in Google Search Console for web crawlers to use.

All active sitemaps automatically regenerate itself once a day and include content from any of their active sitemap definitions. Logs use the Sitemap Generator scope and include the name of the sitemap configuration in the message field.

By implementing SiteMap Generator in ServiceNow with Royal Cyber you can realize the maximum value of your SEO investments. Your instance’s public content will be ready to be crawled by search engines.

If you are looking to implement Search Engine Optimization for your organization, you can email us at [email protected] or visit Royal Cyber.