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Why You Must Have a Site Map And How to Create One

By: Deep Arora

Once you have created your website, structured it around keywords and key phrases, established links and generally optimized it for search engine ranking without detracting from its customer appeal; dont make the one mistake that can potentially undermine all your hard work.

What is the mistake? I Thought you might be asking that. The one mistake that many people make is that despite their best efforts to implement great strategies for SEO; they simply forget, overlook or just dont know to make sure that they have a good sitemap. Whilst a sitemap is a useful tool if you have visitors to your site that havent found what they are after via usual navigation, the significance of a sitemap from an SEO perspective is slightly different.

With a great sitemap you will be able to get search engine crawlers to every page of your website, indexing all of them. If you know about SEO then you understand that the indexing of your site is vital for boosting your page ranking, therefore having a good sitemap is crucial once you have those crawlers there.

To create a good site map there are a few simple steps to follow. Firstly, write the sitemap in simple HTML code and keep the categories in order. Next, use simple lists that are reflective of the actual structure of the website, i.e. category headings should match top level pages and so on. Finally, if you are unsure take a look at what other sites have done with their sitemaps; this can be really helpful if you want to make sure you are on the right track.

o Large websites

If your site is on the large side then a few lines of explanation throughout the sitemap will help visitors to find their way to exactly what they are looking for. This aids the algorithms of the search engines to find their way around your links also. There are a few sitemap tools available that can be helpful if you are creating a sitemap that is to be used with a large website. As a rule, look for a sitemap tool that will run from your desktop, can work with templates that will help to structure your sitemap and will hope you group your pages into the applicable categories. With the introduction of the Google Sitemap Protocol, then it is also worth ensuring your sitemap tool creates a sitemap that meets this requirement as well.

o Google sitemaps

When you are developing your sitemap you should now take into account the fact that Google has introduced a Sitemap Protocol. This simply means that you need to build your sitemap in such a way that you include information required by this protocol and that you create the sitemap not in HTML but in XML format.

For your Google sitemap you will need to incorporate information about URLs; the last time you modified them, if they are regularly changed and a measure of their importance against other URLs in the sitemap. The Google protocol also requires the user of XML not HTML sitemaps. This is important as it is a format that the search engines spiders will more easily recognize and understand.

If you are unsure about how you can create a sitemap that meets these criteria, then it could be worthwhile to look at the sitemap generator tools available. There is a Google Sitemap Generator tool available through Google, and there are others such as Site Map Pro, that can be found online.

A well built sitemap is a crucial part of your SEO plan. If you have gone through the process of optimizing your pages then dont fall down at the last hurdle. Invest the time and energy today into creating a quality sitemap for your web pages. It truly will be time well invested.

Article Source: http://www.bluearticles.com


Deep Arora is an Internet marketer with over 7 years of online experience and he teaches internet marketing from his blog at HowIDid.com. Check out his blog for some amazing techniques today..

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