July 8th, 2010 | 
Author: Are Sitemaps Important?
This article will start by letting us know what a site map is.
Sitemaps as the name implies are just a map of your site that is on a single page that shows the structure of your site its sections the links between them etc. A site map is one page or a set of pages which lists the pages on a web site. The links to all these pages can be on a page if the site is small or otherwise if the site consists of several pages the site map of your web site might run into 2 or more pages. But note that the sitemap must be kept as simple as possible easy to understand and the design should be clean and simple. It will help more if you include the location of your sitemap in robots.txt so that Search spiders will find it right away.
Sitemap tells about the structure of your site and helps in easy indexing building a good site map is critical for web pages which use JavaScript menus because most search engines cannot follow JavaScript links. A Site Map will help those web pages to be indexed by the search engines. A properlycreated sitemap can be submitted to a search engine that supports the sitemap.org protocol to help the engine accurately build its index. You can generate your site map using this free site map generator: http://www.webmasterserve.com/seotools/xmlsitemaps/
Importance of Site map
An updated sitemap should be included in a site to help search engines index your site correctly and also help your visitors find the right content.
The sitemap provides an alternative path that is useful to overcome any problems of reaching a given page by the web spider so the site owner should use relevant keywords in the links to reinforce the rankings on those words.
Most visitors will use the standard navigation buttons on your site to find what they want. This is a very convenience feature as a visitor need not browse through many other pages in order to know what the website is all about the reader can easily figure out the theme and specialty of the website. A sitemap gives an alternative path in case they don’t find your navigation structure especially sites using dynamic pages.
The sitemap priority is to reduce the importance placed on less important pages like a contact page and also influence the links google will display in your authority listing sitelinks.
A sitemap allows you to ping Google Yahoo and MSN when you’ve updated your siteit will get them back crawling your site faster than if you had waited for the bots to come on their own.
Also a useful thing about Sitemaps is the list of URLs not found. It can be very useful for tracking down missing content that’s still linked to.
What Google says about Sitemaps:
Sitemaps are particularly helpful if:
* 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.
If your website is having indexation problems or has a poor internal link structure or falls in one of the three situations described by Google then using a Sitemap would probably be great . Further more if you need help with site map come tolt;a href=”http://www.webmasterserve.com“gt;Webmaster Servelt;/agt; its a good place to learn.
Note that it’s not all about having your sitemap submited to google and sitting down to relax the most important thing is how frequently you add fresh quality and unique content on your website. The simplest way to maximize your SEO strategy is to constantly work on adding keyword rich content to your website and increase your quality backlinks. Search engines typically build their indexes by crawling links on websites.
About the writer: I’m Yusuf Biodun the webmaster of www.sitepromotion.info i can be contacted via http://www.sitepromotion.info/contactus.php.
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