SiteMap
What are Sitemaps?
A site map (or sitemap) is a graphical representation of the architecture of a web site. It can be either a document in any form used as a planning tool for web design, or a web page that lists the pages on a web site, typically organized in hierarchical fashion. This helps visitors and search engine bots find pages on the site.
Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.
Web crawlers 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. Using the Sitemap 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.
Site maps can improve search engine optimization of a site by making sure that all the pages can be found. This is especially important if a site uses Macromedia Flash or JavaScript menus that do not include HTML links.
Most search engines will only follow a finite number of links from a page, so if a site is very large, the site map may be required so that search engines and visitors can access all content on the site.
Action Steps:
1. Create a sitemap either manually or with a sitemap tool.
2. Upload the sitemap.xml to your site for search engine optimization.
3. Upload the sitemap.html to your site and link it to front page for visitor use.
4. Submit site to Google - https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
5. Submit site to Yahoo - https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/feeds?
6. Submit site to ASK.com - http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http://www.YourWebSite.com/sitemap.xml
7. Submit site to MSN.com (include a statement in your robots.txt file Sitemap: http://www.YourWebSite.com/sitemap.xml) replace www.YourWebSite.com with your own site.
*** You will need to update the site map anytime there is a major site to the content. Unless you are using a automatic SiteMap system that rebuilds the map and notifies of changes like Word Press - Google XML Sitemaps.
SiteMap Tools (listed by Google): http://code.google.com/sm_thirdparty.html
Word Press: Google XML Sitemaps - http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/
Advanced Information on sitemaps can be found at: sitemaps.org
Tags: interent marketing, SEO, SiteMap