Now that we’ve covered how you can optimize images in your website, let’s move on to understanding Sitemaps and its effects to your on site SEO structure. This is a Tutorial to Sitemaps.
What is a Sitemap?
In simple terms, a Sitemap is an XML file that is full of your individual webpage’s URLs. It’s like an archive of every webpage in your website. This file should be easily discoverable in your site in order for search engine crawlers to stumble upon it.
What is a Sitemap for?
A Sitemap is usually used for the purpose of letting the search engine crawlers follow the links to all your individual webpages so that it won’t miss out on anything.
Sometimes we leave out URLs or hide them from all visible pages because we don’t exactly want some of the users to go there. As a result, some of these URLs are uncrawlable to search engine spiders.
We can still leave those URLs hidden from some users without having to lose out on those pages not being crawled by search engine spiders through including them in an XML Sitemap.
How do you create a Sitemap?
A Sitemap is pretty easy to create. For WordPress users, you can download the Google XML Sitemaps plugin to make it easier for you. This plugin helps you generate an XML sitemap without having to do anything but activating it.
After the plugin has generated your Sitemap, you can find the Sitemap at an address like this:
http://YourURL/sitemap.xml
My Sitemap can be found at http://seo-hacker.com/sitemap.xml but I usually place the website’s Sitemap at the footer too so that it would have a stronger crawlable presence.
For those who are not using WordPress, you can use this online XML-Sitemaps generator tool. It’s pretty easy and they provide a step-by-step approach for you to implement your own Sitemap in your website.
How does your Sitemap affect your SEO?
Search engines should see all the pages that you want them to see. The more pages that they index from you, the more trust your site gains. It only means that your website has more information to offer.
Making sure the search engine spiders get to crawl all the stuff they need to crawl from your website is the exact purpose of a Sitemap. It’s not for navigation, it’s not for internal linking. It’s for the search engine spiders.
It won’t greatly boost your on-site SEO, but it would definitely help.
Tips for Keeps: Get your own Sitemap if you don’t already have one. It’s easy and it’s necessary.
This entry is part of the SEO Hacker School series: Complete On Site Optimization Tutorial
About Sean
A general thought about people who do not use any plugins can definitely go with webmaster tools and find out best possible results..
Nice information.
Without sitemap nowadays, there is not much use of backlink also.
Woah, I don’t think that’s true. Backlinks will always help you if they are of good quality.
Do You know any good and free tools for XML Sitemap building?
Well yeah you can use Google’s sitemap builder or you can use the Google XML plugin if you’re using WordPress
I don’t know why but just last week I finally got a sitemap for just about all my sites. I’m excited to see if it really helps me in some way. Maybe I’ll start getting a few extra visitors that I normally wouldn’t get. You never know!
Jeff Wise recently posted..PopUp Domination 3.0 Review – New Features And Themes
Hey Sean, I have found you on Twitter – after that I have landed in this blog. 1st of all thanks a lot for sharing this article – really good topic to discuss. I want to share here something: For SEO to be effective it is important that the search engine spiders and web crawlers can properly index a site. Based on your site’s architecture and its links (both external and internal) the engines can establish and weight the profile of how each interacts to map out which pages have the highest significance to their index. I hope my points will add some more value in this article. Keep it up – will surely visit back again.
Hey Sean,
I have recently created an unlimited XML sitemap generator tool which may be of use?
simplesitemapgenerator.org
Thanks
Michael