Guide to Creating Google Sitemaps
September 9, 2008
The hardest part of building a website is not…
* The programming code * The navigation menu * Or even deciding what the website will be about
Nope. The hardest part of building a website is generating high quality niched traffic to your web pages. That’s exactly where creating Google sitemaps come in so handy.
What is a site map you ask?
Here are 3 people’s conceptions of what a site map is.
* “A page which contains an organized listing of links to all pages within the website” ===> legalinternetmarketing.com/seo-glossary.html
* “An alternate method, and quickly becoming the preferred method, of letting the Search Engine Spiders know about all the pages in your site” ===> rushwebsolutions.com/index.cfm
* “A hierarchical list of web pages that belong to a site.” ===> yoursearchadvisor.com/glossary.php
Simply put, if you are interested in search engines finding every part of your website (and who isn’t?); then you need to have a sitmap as part of your internet marketing strategy. Read more
Benefits a Site Map
September 4, 2008
A site map basically is a page that features or lists the links you have on your web site. This will make it easier for search engines to proceed and spider your web site. It is usually found near the bottom page of a web site.
The following tips will be very useful in designing a site map:
1. Link the sitemap only to your homepage. This is to ensure that the spider starts searching from your homepage down to all the pages listed in your sitemap. In this way, no page would be left unvisited by the spider.
2. Do not go beyond 30 pages for a sitemap. Large websites having 50 or more pages should not go beyond 30 since this adds more pages to the site, and might make search engines think that the sitemap is a link farm. Also, this prevents overcrowding of links which could be tiring to view.
3. Check all the links listed in your sitemap. It can be discouraging when you click on a link only to find out that nothing is displayed. Test your sitemap; click all links in every page to make sure that all links are indeed linked to the right page.
4. Give keyword-rich titles to sitemap links. Keyword-rich titles give your site more advantage in being searched properly under the right category. But be sure to have this sitemap link linked back to the sitemap (e.g. back to sitemap). Read more