A Powerful Way To Get Online Rankings: Sitemaps
Most search engines like Google send crawlers out to your site to see what pages you have created and then proceed to add them to their index. But what if they miss some pages or you make changes and they do not come back for another few months? How can you let the search engines know? The answer is through sitemaps.
What is a sitemap?
A sitemap is a file that contains the details of all the pages on your website. If you add a new page or modify an existing one all you have to do is edit your sitemap file to let the search engines know. In November 2006, Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft all agreed to support the sitemap protocol. Ask.com has now also agreed which means the four leading search engines are all on board.
How do I create a sitemap?
There are a number of ways to create a sitemap. My personal favorite is the GSiteCrawler. It is a free download that you can download to your computer. Once you run the program it will crawl your website and automatically create a sitemap for you according to the sitemap protocal (saving you tons of time and energy!). Because of all the new content we are regularly adding to my site, I run a sitemap every week.
How do I tell the search engines about my sitemap?
You should create a link in your robots.txt file to your sitemap. All the major search engines will look through your robots.txt file so it is a quick way to let them know. Google and Yahoo have also created tools to allow you to let them know as soon as you make a sitemap change. This is not yet possible with Microsoft and Ask.com.
If you are not yet using sitemaps chances are the search engines are missing some of your pages and have an out of date record of what you have on your website. Make sure the hard work you put into creating quality website content is not wasted and tell the search engines that you have updated your pages by creating and submitting your sitemaps.
This entry was posted on Sunday, June 3rd, 2007 at 6:24 am and is filed under world wide web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
