Now that you have some wonderfully search engine optimized pages we need to make them fully available to search engines in a nice neat format. To do this we will need a sitemap!

What is a sitemap?

A sitemap is page which contains an organized list of links to all pages within the website. Having a well structured sitemap will help a search engine spider and index the pages.

Why use a sitemap?

Well Google has the following to say on the subject…

Sitemaps are particularly helpful if:

• Your site has dynamic content.
• Your site has pages that aren’t easily discovered by Googlebot during the crawl process - for example, pages featuring rich AJAX or Flash.
• Your site is new and has few links to it. (Googlebot crawls the web by following links from one page to another, so if your site isn’t well linked, it may be hard for us to discover it.)
• Your site has a large archive of content pages that are not well linked to each other, or are not linked at all.

You can also use a Sitemap to provide Google with additional information about your pages, including:

• How often the pages on your site change. For example, you might update your product page daily, but update your About Me page only once every few months.
• The date each page was last modified.
• The relative importance of pages on your site. For example, your home page might have a relative importance of 1.0, category pages have an importance of 0.8, and individual blog entries or product pages have an importance of 0.5. This priority only indicates the importance of a particular URL relative to other URLs on your site, and doesn’t impact the ranking of your pages in search results.

Sitemaps provide additional information about your site to Google, complementing our normal methods of crawling the web. We expect they will help us crawl more of your site and in a more timely fashion, but we can’t guarantee that URLs from your Sitemap will be added to the Google index. Sites are never penalized for submitting Sitemaps.

How do I create a sitemap?

There are a few methods for creating sitemaps pending on your site situation. If you are using a CMS ( content management system ) or a blog, you can use a third party plugin that will generate a sitemap for you and keep it updated. Now if your situation calls for it you could use a sitemap generator to scan your sites pages and create the sitemap for you - the problem with this is that when you add new content you will need to add new entries to your sitemap. There are also sitemap scripts that you can use on your site that will create and update your sitemap.

How do I link to my sitemap?

Your sitemap should be linked to from your sites homepage. A simple link in the footer of your page using the text Sitemap will do just fine. Your sitemap should be located in the root directory of your site. This would be the same place as your sites index file.

The link to your sitemap would look something like the following:

<a href="http://www.foo.com/sitemap.xml">Sitemap</a>

You would of course replace www.foo.com with your own sites information.

Basic SEO Steps

• SEO : Getting Started
• SEO : Step One : Keyword Research
• SEO : Step Two : Meta Tags
• SEO : Step Three : Header Tags
• SEO : Step Four : Content
• SEO : Step Five : Paging Structure
• SEO : Step Six : Bold Keywords
• SEO : Step Seven : SEO Images
• SEO : Step Eight : Sitemap
• SEO : Step Nine : RSS
• SEO : Step Ten : Submissions

About The Author

Written by MissDanni
MissDanni is a jill of all trades, from web design to web promotion and everything in between, you might just say web everything. Working in the web industry since 2000 she continues to learn new things everyday. "Nothing is impossible if you are willing to take the time to learn and make mistakes."

Other posts by MissDanni

Tags: diy seo, SEO, seo help, seo tips, sitemap

Suggested Reading

Christmas Gifts
Buy Amazing Christmas Gifts on Walmart for your family [..]
US Colleges
Choose the right college with our site. Check some [..]