Sitemaps are an important component to effective organic search engine optimization. I include it in the list of my ‘SEO Fundamentals’ because I feel that they are one of the core principals of SEO. The purpose of a sitemap is to notify the search engine when crawling of all the pages to crawl on a given website. A wannabe SEO is evident when he/she does not use sitemaps in their seo protocol. If you search around on Google for various topics for our region here in Utah, you will notice many poor SEO tactics (or lack there of). A lack of a sitemap is one of those.
When creating and setting up your sitemap it’s important to follow specific sitemap protocol that has been created. You can learn all about these protocols at www.sitemaps.org, a site dedicated to give information regarding sitemaps and how to use them effectively. There is a lot to learn from this site, and I suggest reading every inch of sitemaps.org if you are serious about search engine optimization.
Sitemap requirements are different depending on the search engine. I typically just follow Google’s standard and forget about everyone else. Since Google is responsible for close to 90% of all traffic to every single one of my websites I tend to only worry about Google in my SEO efforts. What many Utah websites lack is a sitemap that meets Google requirements, that is a sitemap in XML format. A sitemap.xml file which is directed to from the Robots.txt file.
Let Me Explain My Sitemap Process
What I do is instead of creating my own XML sitemap from scratch, I just use xml-sitemaps.com where I can enter a url and the free tool creates a sitemap.xml for me via crawling my website. I upload that sitemap.xml file to my document root. I then create a robots.txt file which contains this:
sitemap: http://mysite.com/sitemap.xml
That’s it! That simple step allows me to quickly create a Google compliant sitemap and set it up for my website. Now Google crawls all my pages the next time it makes its rounds to my website. So on your next campaign make sure to include your sitemap.xml file with your robots.txt in your SEO campaign. You will see a substantial difference.
Sponsor: Reliable Web Hosting, Unlimited Domains, $6.95 a month with Bluehost.com
Recent Entries
- Blogging For Higher Rankings (video)
- The Best Keyword Usage Advice I Have Found
- 10 SEO Myths Explained
- Utah Specific SEO - 11 Quick Tips
- Using StumbleUpon For Utah Websites
- Still No Word From UtahSEOPlanet
- Too Many Categories on Your Blog
- 7 Social Networks For Relevant Links
- Increase Traffic 58%
- City of Orem Business Directory
Recent Comments
- 97th Floor: Not sure if you figured this
- Russell Page: It does nothing.
- martin: SEO myths are very interesting. Natural
- Bill Ross: Great outline, I would also add
- Bill Ross: Yes having good descriptive anchor text
- Andy MacDonald: Hey, Many thanks for posting my
- admin: It's a good way to try
- Utah Real Estate Listings: Is this comment a good example
- admin: That sounds like a great idea.
- Joshua Steimle: "I do not like their web
2 Responses
Sitemap Plugin For Wordpress | utahseopro.com
January 27th, 2008 at 7:24 pm
1[...] discussed before the importance of sitemaps and the critical role they play in search engine optimization. It can be difficult to continually [...]
Free XML Sitemap Generator | utahseopro.com
January 27th, 2008 at 7:41 pm
2[...] is by the far the best tool you can use for accomplishing this task. It follows all the sitemap protocols for Google, who let’s be honest is the only one who really matters. The tool is very easy to use because [...]
RSS feed for comments on this post · TrackBack URI
Leave a reply
Categories
Links
Calendar