Saturday, December 03, 2005

All About Sitemap

What is a sitemap ?

A sitemap is a collection of hyperlinks that outlines and defines the website's overall structure. It provides both the end user and the search engine spider / crawler with the opportunity to navigate or index your web site more efficiently.

Why is a sitemap important for web site ?

A sitemap plays an important role in terms of search engine optimization (SEO) as it enables the spider to crawl your site more efficiently plus it provides them with a clear overview to the content's of your web site. Google has indorsed the need for including a sitemap on your web site and has introduced an option called Google Sitemaps "which is an easy way for you to help improve your coverage in the Google index".

Please note before creating a sitemap make sure your page titles and meta descriptions clearly reflect the contents of your individual page contents as this will help both your visitor and the Bots understand what each document contained in your web site is about and index, rank it accordingly.

Where can I download a sitemap component :

A number of very good sitemap components have being developed which you can install. The best one I found which free is available at http://www.sitemapdoc.com/

Google Sitemap Generator.

The Google site map generator will automatically generate an XML sitemap file of your web site which you can submit to the Google sitemap web site. For more information click Google sitemap generator.

No comments: