By : Admin

If you want your website indexed onto the major search engines, you will need a sitemap – XML sitemaps amongst the most effective!

Some time ago, top search engines like MSN, Yahoo and Google has added a great tool to their toolkit. Now, they all are going to standardize on the use of one common XML Sitemap file to index the websites (Search engines can crawl sitemaps quickly if they are all following the same formats; and therefore provide you with better indexing of each page!).

XML sitemaps are simply a way of allowing major search engines to crawl URL’s listed. It is a quick and easy way for you to keep your site constantly indexed and updated in Google. XML is only simple code like HTML and it is used to syndicate your content to all interested parties.

XML generated file on your site will transmit or send any updates, changes, and data to Google. XML (Extensible Markup Language) is everywhere these days!

Each XML has a structure in order to for a search engine to crawl through the links and therefore index them. Keeping your sitemap, clean and manageable will help you to update it, making indexing again more effective. Removing URL’s that are no longer there, and replacing these with new URL’s, with fresh content further enhance your sites fresh appeal to the crawling search engines.

This is a ‘Good’ thing! With the steady influx of new web sites growing rapidly, indexing all this material will become a challenge, even with the resources of Google. With Sitemaps, webmasters can now take charge and make sure their site is crawled and indexed!

With Sitemaps, you can make sure all your pages are crawled and indexed quickly by Google.

In order for this XML sitemap file on your site to be constantly updated, you need a Generator that would spider your site, list the entire URL and automatically feed them to Google and thus, constantly updating your site in Google’s massive index or database. Keep in mind, Google also gives you the option of submitting a simple text file with all your URLs!

There are different ways of generating your XML powered sitemap file. You just have to choose one and then upload the file to your site as sitemap.xml to the root directory of your server i.e., where you have your homepage. Then notify Google Sitemaps of your XML file and you’re in business.

Of course, the only drawback, if you constantly add pages to your site you will need to also add these pages to your XML sitemap file!

To conclude, an XML sitemap is a must for anyone interested in building search engine recognition and gaining a higher search rating. This is a really basic SEO tool, which is used by millions of websites as they battle it out in order to achieve the highest search engine ranks.

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By: Deepti Jain

In November 2006, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft agreed to support the Sitemap protocol. The Sitemap protocol is a standard that can help you to submit all of your web pages to search engines.

Last week, Ask.com joined the team so that now all four major search engines support the Sitemap protocol. In addition, search engines can now automatically detect your Sitemaps file.

What are sitemaps and what is the official Sitemaps protocol?

A Sitemap is an XML file that can be made available on a website and acts as a marker for search engines to crawl certain pages. It is an easy way for webmasters to make their sites more search engine friendly. It does this by conveniently allowing webmasters to list all of their URLs along with optional metadata, such as the last time the page changed, to improve how search engines crawl and index their websites.

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By: Rand Fishkin | Source: seomoz.org

A sitemap is a document (typically xml) that sits on your server and helps search engine spiders crawl and index your site. Sounds great, right? Maybe… maybe not. Rand theorizes these sitemaps may actually be bad for your SEO efforts.

It sounds bizarre, almost counterintuitive, but many of best minds in the world of SEO appear to be rallying around the idea that submitting a feed to Google Sitemaps and Yahoo! Site Explorer is actually a terrible idea. The logic behind the practice is simple, if you follow the steps:

1. Without sitemaps, a search engine visits your site’s pages through links on and off the site, indexing and ranking those pages it deems worthy of being indexed and ranked.
2. When a search engine crawls your site and fails to index particluar pages, you have a signal from the engines that those pages lack the necessary components for inclusion, be they architectural, link strength, content-related, etc.

Read more at seomoz.org

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