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Practice

SEO Tools - robots, sitemap, rss

In SEO, there are additional tools available to effectively introduce your website to search engines.

In this lesson, we will cover commonly used SEO tools: robots.txt, sitemap, and rss.


robots.txt​

robots.txt is a text file within a website that tells search engines which pages should or should not be crawled.

robots.txt Example
User-agent: *
Disallow: /private/
Allow: /public/

The above robots.txt instructs all search engines to disallow access to the /private/ directory and allow access to the /public/ directory.


Sitemap​

A sitemap is a file that lists the pages of a website and indicates their relationships.

The sitemap informs search engines about the structure of a website and acts as a map showing links within web pages.

sitemap Example
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
   <url>
      <loc>https://example.com/page1</loc>
      <lastmod>2023-10-15</lastmod>
      <changefreq>daily</changefreq>
   </url>
   <url>
      <loc>https://example.com/page2</loc>
   </url>
</urlset>

This sitemap example lists two web pages, and page1 includes its last modification date and change frequency.


RSS​

rss is a file that automatically informs subscribers about content updates on a website. It is commonly used by blogs, newsletters, and web services.

rss Example
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<rss version="2.0">
<channel>
  <title>My Website News</title>
  <link>https://example.com</link>
  <description>Latest updates from My Website</description>
  <item>
     <title>New Article</title>
     <link>https://example.com/new-article</link>
     <description>This is a new article.</description>
  </item>
</channel>
</rss>

In the above example, the update information is presented under the title 'My Website News,' introducing the content titled 'New Article.'

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