Search engine sitemapsSearch engine sitemaps get you and the search engines more in sync with each other. Sitemaps let you tell the search engines about the pages on your site... ...and let the search engines tell you what they know about your site in return! These sitemaps are not the same thing as your "site map" - the HTML page that you build on your site listing all your pages. We'll start by focusing on Google Sitemaps, then take a brief look at Yahoo! Site Explorer. What is a search engine sitemap?A sitemap is a file; my sitemap file is in XML format, and it's basically a list of all the URLs, or pages, of my site, along with a snippet of info about how important each page is within the structure of the site and when it was last updated.Here's a little glimpse into the depths of my sitemap file:
Find more information from Google about how to create a sitemap file. As I am pretty much a non-tech kind of person, my web host creates my sitemap file, and updates it automatically; if you can find a web host who can do this for you, that's a big plus. Google has a sitemap generator, or there are sitemap creator tools on the web - check for those in the search engines. What's good about sitemaps?According to Google, "Sitemaps helps speed up the discovery of your pages" - which can be no bad thing.And once you've signed up for a Google Webmaster Tools Account, and submitted your sitemap, you get to see what Google knows about your site. Well, some of what they know, anyway :) What features might you find useful? Well, for example:
One thing to bear in mind - submitting a sitemap to Google will not influence rankings for your pages. Yahoo! Site ExplorerYou can add your site to Yahoo's Site Explorer. I use the same XML file that I submitted to Google.Again, this lets Yahoo! know about all your site's pages, and you get to see links into your site as well as the last crawl date of each page. Yahoo! doesn't give as much information yet as Google, however. Are sitemaps useful?The information provided by Google is certainly interesting; I've heard that search engine sitemaps help you to get pages indexed faster, and I agree - it took months for my previous sites to get indexed properly, whereas websitetrafficideas.com is all up to date and appearing in Google a few weeks after the site's creation. So they've got the thumbs up from me!
|
