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Utilizing SiteMaps for SEO
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These days web designers are giving up fast load times and valid coding for more visually stunning sites which is a huge mistake for Search Engine Optimization and they have to compensate for it by using services like Google AdWords and paying huge $$ just to get hits. Some sites are still using a splash page or other types of intro pages because of this, yet it doesnt help much because splash pages usually have little or no content for search engines to read and only one link to follow. Todays search engines are overloaded because of the sheer number of websites and pages on the internet so sometimes search engines will skip pages contained in a site even if they have the proper meta tags indicating that the pages should be indexed and links followed.
There are things about your web pages that search engine robots evaluate to determine if they should continue to index the page and follow links, without getting too technical a few of these are load time and correct coding. If your pages load slowly or the robot is having trouble reading through your code it is trained not to waste alot of time trying to sort it out so it will start skipping pages. There are also elements beyond our control like search engine scans that are not intended to look at every page and differs greatly depending on the company and what that specific robots tasks are.
There are a few things you can do to ensure you get more of your pages listed and probably the most effective is the use of Sitemaps. This method is a request or instruction to let the search engine robots know that you would like more pages to be scanned. For along time on my site Google and Alexa had only indexed the main page and skipped over the rest of the site until I put in a Google sitemap. You really should use 3 types of sitemaps.
1. Google xml sitemap (google.xml)
2. Generic xml sitemap (sitemap.xml)
3. HTML sitemap (sitemap.html)
For a good free online sitemap generator you can got to AuditMyPC - www.auditmypc.com/free-sitemap-generator.asp .
First make a Google sitemap, then register the sitemap with Google- www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ . You will need to have a Google account to submit your sitemap, if you dont have one already you need to create an account so you can tell google where the sitemap is located, what the name of it is and verify that this is your site. This will tell the Googlebots when they visit your site that it needs to look at these other pages as well. Name this sitemap google.xml because you need one other xml sitemap for Yahoo and the other search engines and it needs to be named sitemap.xml.
Next export the generic xml sitemap for Yahoo and other SE’s, this time naming it sitemap.xml. and when its finished crawling export it as an xml file. Yahoo used to require a text format sitemap but now can accept several formats. You can see what formats are accepted when you create your Yahoo account or sign in to your existing account to submit the sitemap. Yahoo's sitemap area is called Site Explorer- http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/ .
You should name the generic xml sitemap sitemap.xml because some search engines including Yahoo scan for an XML file with this specific name. For Google it doesnt matter what the name is because you will specify the file name when you register it.
The 3rd Sitemap you should have is the html version. You can make that with the same program at AuditMyPC SiteMaps, The same generator you used for the other sitemaps. It isnt redundant to do this either. Alot of people and SE bots look for this file as well and is provided as a courtesy to your users who may have trouble with navigation menus or find them confusing. Plus it gets you another page indexed that contains all of your links.
This all sounds like alot but it will help insure that pages in your site arent overlooked by the already overloaded search engine bots.
Kelly Welsh
MapZone infoBase Blog- http://info.mapzone.net
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