Utilizing SiteMaps for SEO

Authored By Kelly Welsh

These days web designers are giving up fast load times and correct 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 doesn't 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 4 types of sitemaps.

1. Google xml sitemap (google.xml)
2. Generic xml sitemap (sitemap.xml)
3. Text sitemap for Yahoo (urllist.txt)
4. HTML sitemap (sitemap.html)

You will have to find a website and/or software that can create these 4 types of sitemaps. There are many websites that offer these free of charge. Make sure that you find one that can make Google specific sitemaps because they are different and have different tags than regular XML sitemaps.

First make a Google sitemap. Next register the sitemap with Google Sitemaps. You will need to have a Google account to submit your sitemap, 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 the pages indicated in the sitemap becasue sometimes search engine robots will skip over alot of website pages. Name this sitemap google.xml because you need one other xml sitemap for the other search engines and it should be named sitemap.xml.

Now make the generic XML sitemap for other search engines this time naming it sitemap.xml and when its finished crawling export it as a plain xml file. finally you will also need a text version style sitemap named urllist.txt. This is for Yahoo. You should name the generic xml sitemap sitemap.xml because some search engines 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 Yahoo sitemap must be named urllist.txt and once you have that made you can submit it to Yahoo Website Submission. You will need to have a Yahoo account to do this so if you dont have one already you will have to create a Yahoo account. You can submit the txt sitemap as well as the main site and/or individual pages.

The 4th Sitemap you should have is the html version to place on your website. You can find various free programs to do this. It isnt redundant to do this either. Alot of people and search engine 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 ensure that pages in your site isn't overlooked by the already overloaded search engine bots. By creating and using these 4 sitemaps you are instructing the search engines to look at these additional pages that may be overlooked. Dont fall for the 'Search Engine Submission' Service scams that are out there. Submitting your site to search engines does absolutely nothing. Why? Because they are already trying to index everything, but sometimes pages get skipped over for several reasons and by using the sitemaps and submitting those (free) you are indicating to the search engines that you have additional pages that you would like to be indexed.

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