Sitemaps to Success
12:04, Tuesday, 26 April 2011
Now us guys have got a bit of a reputation for refusing assistance when it comes to seeking directions, but when it comes to the internet, you should have no excuses when it comes to directing search engines to your website. And just like a real world car journey, the best way to show Google and Co. the way is with a map.
Sitemaps are the easy way to show search engines where all the pages of your site are located, allowing them to access, and index, all your content from one handy page. Here are some of the benefits:
- Your website gains easier navigation and better visibility from search engines.
- You get the opportunity to have your content changes indexed faster. Through the sitemap you basically inform search engines immediately about any changes on your site.
- A Sitemap gives you more freedom regarding your relation to external links, which usually have the role of bringing search engines to your site.
- It can be of help with accidentally broken internal links or orphaned pages that cannot be reached in other ways.
- It is of high importance for new sites to have a Sitemap: it speeds the process of indexing pages.
- It is of great help in classifying your site content better. Although it does not mean the search engines will necessarily classify a page as belonging to a particular category or as matching a particular keyword only because of your sitemap, there is an increased likelihood that they would.
There are plenty of sites out there, designed to help you create a simple sitemap in XML and HTML format (both preferred by search engines), and it’s as simple as uploading the file to the root directory of your site (e.g. http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml). A really simple and easy-to-use tool can be found at http://www.xml-sitemaps.com and the whole process should take no longer than 5 minutes.
You can go a step further, and use Google’s Webmaster Tools to tell Google where your sitemap is located. Even without this step, however, all the major search engines should be indexing more pages in no time, and as you should have discovered by now … more content = more traffic = more business for you!
Tags: seo,sitemaps,crawlability