There are lots of SEO tips and tricks that help out in optimizing a site but one of those, the significance of which is sometimes underestimated is sitemaps. Sitemaps, as the name implies, are just a map of your site i.e. on one particular page you show the structure of your site, its sections, the links between them, and so on. Sitemaps make navigating your site easier and having an updated sitemap on your site is good both for your users as well as for search engines. Sitemaps are an essential way of communication with search engines. Whereas in robots.txt you tell search engines which parts of your site to eliminate from indexing, in your site map you tell search engines where you would like them to go. Sitemaps are not a novelty. They have always been part of finest Web design practices but with the acceptance of sitemaps by search engines, at present they become even more important. However, it is obligatory to make a clarification that if you are interested in sitemaps mainly from a SEO point of view; you can't go on with the conventional sitemap only (though currently Yahoo! and MSN still go on with the standard html format). For instance, Google Sitemaps uses a special (XML) format that is different from the normal html sitemap for human visitors.
One may ask why two sitemaps are necessary. The answer is simple - one is for humans, the other is for spiders (for now mainly Googlebot but it is reasonable to look forward to that other crawlers will join the club shortly). In that relation it is mandatory to clarify that having two sitemaps is not regarded as duplicate content. In 'Introduction to Sitemaps', Google unambiguously states that using a sitemap will never lead to penalty for your site.
Why we make Use of a Sitemap
Using sitemaps has lots of benefits, not only easier navigation and improved visibility by search engines. Sitemaps offer the opportunity to inform search engines instantaneously about any changes on your site. Of course, you can't expect that search engines will rush right away to index your changed pages but surely the changes will be indexed faster, compared to when you don't have a sitemap.
Moreover, when you have a sitemap and submit it to the search engines, you rely less on external links that will bring search engines to your site. Sitemaps can still help with messy internal links - for example if you by accident have broken down internal links or orphaned pages that can't be reached in other way (however there is no doubt that it is much better to attach your errors than rely on a sitemap).
If your site is new, or if you have an important number of new (or newly updated pages), then using a sitemap can be very important to your success. Even though you can still go without a sitemap, it is expected that soon sitemaps will become the standard way of submitting a site to search engines. Even if it is certain that spiders will continue to index the Web as well as sitemaps will not make the standard crawling procedures obsolete, it is logical to say that the significance of sitemaps will go on increasing.
Sitemaps also help in classifying your site content, although search engines are by no means grateful to classify a page as belonging to a particular category or as matching a particular keyword just because you have told them so.
Having in mind that the sitemap programs of major search engines (and particularly Google) are still in beta, using a sitemap may not generate huge advantages right away but as search engines improve their sitemap indexing algorithms, it is likely that more and more sites will be indexed quickly via sitemaps.
Generating As Well As Submitting The Sitemap
The steps you want to perform in order to have a sitemap for your site are simple. Initially, you have to generate it, then you upload it to your site, and at last you notify Google about it.
Based upon on your technical skills, there are multiple ways to generate a sitemap - to download as well as install a sitemap generator or to make use of an online sitemap generation tool. The first is more complicated but you have more control over the output. First you have to download the Google sitemap generator. After you download the package, go after the installation and configuration instructions in it. This generator is a Python script, so your Web server should have Python 2.2 or later installed, in order to run it.
The second way to generate a sitemap is easier. There are lots of free online tools that can do the job for you. For instance, have a look at this collection of Third-party Sitemap tools. Even though Google says explicitly that it has neither tested, nor verified them, this list will be helpful because it includes links to online generators, sitemap plugins for popular content-management systems, downloadable sitemap generators, etc., so you will be able to find accurately what you need.
After you have created the sitemap, you have to upload it to your site (if it is not already there) and inform Google about its existence. Notifying Google includes toting up the site to your Google Sitemaps account, so if you don't have an account with Google, it is high time to open one. One more detail that is useful to know in advance is that in order to add the sitemap to your account, you must verify that you are the genuine owner of the site.
At present Yahoo! and MSN do not support sitemaps, or at least not in the XML format, used by Google. Yahoo! allows webmasters to submit "a text file with a list of URLs" which can really be a stripped-down version of a site map), whereas MSN does not offer even that but there are rumors that it is indexing sitemaps when they are obtainable onsite. Most likely this situation will change in the near future and both Yahoo! as well as MSN will hold with Google because user-submitted site maps are just a too dominant SEO tool and can't be ignored.
Labels: Significance of Sitemaps
posted by India Seos
@ 1:23 PM
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