Learn/An-HTML-Sitemap-Helps-Search-Engines-Discover-You
Revision as of 21:45, 21 July 2010 by KristinaWeis (talk | contribs)
The purpose of a Sitemap is to help search engine 'spiders' find and index all the pages on a website, and faster than they may otherwise.
Indexing is important because if a page on a website hasn't been indexed by a search engine, it cannot show up for any search query in that search engine.
A Sitemap is particularly helpful to websites that:
- have several pages that aren't linked to from other prominent pages
- have lots of pages (more than x)
Types of Sitemaps
The primary type is an XML Sitemap.
The other type is a simple HTML sitemap, that is just like another web page. You have probably seen these on some sites, as a "sitemap" link in the footer.
You can also create a simple text file with one URL per line or an RSS feed (typically for blogs).
Google recommends creating a Sitemap using the Sitemap Protocol because it can be used for other search engines too.
Creating your Sitemap
Make it work: Let the search engines know about your Sitemap
Submit Sitemap to Google via Google Webmaster Tools. This is nice because you can use Google Webmaster Tools to see how many of the pages in your Sitemap are indexed at any given time. Plus Google Webmaster Tools has many other helpful stats for, well, webmasters.
To the right is a helpful video from ReadyMadeWeb.com about submitting your Sitemap in Google Webmaster Tools.
You can also submit a Sitemap to Bing using their webmasters tools offering.
If you're familiar with robots.txt you can specify your Sitemap there.
Google Webmaster Central about Sitemaps
Points of Order
- Supplementary, pages not in sitemap can still be found and indexed other ways
- You can have multiple sitemaps, and overlap is okay