Where is Your Sitemap?
Posted on | July 3, 2008 | drew stauffer
Sitemap pages are a great way to let the search engines know what content is on your website. But what kind of sitemap are you using?
You could use a regular page from your website, an HTML, PHP, ASP, or whatever type of page will work. These pages are great for users because they list all of the pages in your website. Ideally, you would also include a description for each page so a user would know what they’re going to get when they click the link, instead of just a word that lists the page names.
These pages will help the search engines but not nearly as much as an XML Sitemap. An XML Sitemap is a page that you can literally upload to the search engines to let them know specifically what pages you have on your website instead of waiting for them to find all of your pages.
Through Google Webmaster Tools you can submit your XML Sitemap, and once your site is verified, you can get a lot of extra information about your website, including:
- Any errors your site has
- Last time your site was searched by Google
- A content analysis that will give you information about your titles and descriptions
- Your top search queries
- Crawl Stats
- Both external and internal link data
- Plus a lot more
You can easily generate an XML Sitemap through many sources, I prefer XML-Sitmaps.com. Simply enter your URL and the site does the rest. It will spit out your perfect XML Sitemap that you’ll then submit to Google.
Follow all the steps in Webmaster Tools and you’ll be well on your way to making sure your entire website is as Google friendly as possible.
Did you like this post? Here are a few more:
- SEO Quick Tip: Title Tag
- USA Today Speaks with Matt Cutts About Search Engine Optimization
- Re-branding a Website? Don’t Forget Your Re-directs
- SEO Quick Tip: Meta Description
- SEO Quick Tip: Cross Links
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July 3rd, 2008 @ 5:20 pm
I’ve noticed that Google often offers several links directly to pages deeper in a site under a given search result – does submitting your XML Sitemap help Google construct these links, or is there something else at play here?
July 7th, 2008 @ 10:03 am
@Josh Lyall
The indented listing is usually a more specific URL referring to what ever you searched for. Google sitemaps can help with this since it will help Google to understand your site structure, but there are many other factors involved.