Sitemaps: Help Google help you

When designing a website, you need to be mindful of how your pages are interlinked. This is very important for SEO performance. The more pages you accumulate on your blog or website, the more pages that will eventually get buried on Google. To correct this you should create a sitemap so that you can create links to every page on your site.

Even if you use Wordpress you should not assume that the archives will automatically contain links to all your pages because they don’t. So regardless of the type of website that you have, a sitemap is in order.

An XML sitemap is a separate page within your site and is linked to as “sitemap.” It provides links for all of your pages. But it is no ordinary list either. An XML sitemap gives data on the URLs, such as when the page was last updated, how often it changes, how important the page is compared to other pages on the site, etc. This helps the search engine crawl and index your page more effectively. If you enjoy the geeky technical details, you can read more about the technical specifications of sitemaps at: http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.php

The other reason to add a XML sitemap is because Google highly recommends it. If Google likes it then that will mean they will be friendly toward sites with sitemaps. Here’s what Google says on its site:

“Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link. Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site.”

Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have all agreed on a single sitemap standard. This means that web designers only have to make one kind of sitemap to serve traffic from all the search engines. This is obviously a good thing from a SEO perspective.

Fortunately, there are many free sitemap generators available and, of course, Wordpress plugins. The one I use and recommend is “Google Sitemap Generator“. As you’ll see, the XML sitemap does more than just provide links to your pages. Some of its features include: support for multi-level categories and pages, category/page exclusion, multiple-page generation with navigation, permalink support, choose what to display, what order to list items in, show comment counts and/or post dates, and more.

Websites that do not use WordPress should also have an XML sitemap. Fortunately, the creation process for them can be automated too using a services like XML-Sitemaps.com

Quick Tip: After you add your sitemap you can let the search engines know about it by pinging it with Ping-o-Matic. This will speed up the process of the spiders crawling your website.

· Topic: Web design  · Tags: Google, SEO, SERPs, sitemap, XML