The Importance of Sitemaps
What's a Sitemap?
Sitemaps are an easy way for viewers of your website
to grab a quick snapshot of the pages contained within your site.
Think of it as your website Index of pages. It's also an invaluable
way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their
sites that are available for crawling.
A time for discovery
Web crawlers commonly known as 'spiders' usually discover pages
from links within the site and from other sites. Sitemaps
supplement this data to allow crawlers that support Sitemaps to
pick up all URLs in the Sitemap and learn about those URLs using
the associated metadata. Use of Sitemaps does not guarantee that
web pages are included in search engines, but provides hints for
web crawlers to do a better job of crawling your site.
Where do I start?
The easiest way to create a Sitemap is a simple HTML document thats
lists all the pages contained within the site or at least the major
category pages if you have large site. Obviously the list of pages
are hyperlinked to the relevent page within the site, therefore
making it easier for yoru viewers to navigate your site.
Tip: Add a brief description of the page content after
the linked text to help your viewers, for example rather than listing
your About Us page as;
About Us
try this...
Company Profile Information - A complete
introduction to our company and it's employees
OK, where to now...
Ok so you have created your HTML Sitemap with links to all pages
within your site...that's great, your viewers will appreciate all
the assistance they can get, but what about the search engines?
Well fear not there is also a facility to upload your Sitemap information
to Google, Yahoo etc for them to crawl your site and it's by creating
an XML Sitemap.
The easiest form of XML Sitemap creator tools around
has to be XML-Sitemaps.com
they offer a free XML and HTML creator tool that crawls your site
and outputs a XML file ready for inclusion to Google etc. To access
simply click here.
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