The Importance of Sitemaps

Written by | Posted in SEO | Posted on Date 07-11-2009 | Comments 2 Comments
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Sitemaps are important because they allow the search engines like Google and Yahoo! to index your entire site and leave it available for other internet users to find. A sitemap is defined:

A site map (or sitemap) is a representation of the architecture of a web site. It can be either a document in any form used as a planning tool for web design, or a web page that lists the pages on a web site, typically organized in hierarchical fashion.
From Wikipedia. Original definition by Peter Morville, Information Architecture on the World Wide Web, Feb 1998, pp:58

A sitemap allows search engines to crawl your site more efficiently and index fresh material from any website. If a webmaster has move or deleted material, the search engine would recognize and change the search engine results to reflect the website change. Although having a sitemap eliminates most of the work that a webmasters takes in submitting a website to search, it does not totally eradicate the effort.
Sitemaps accepted by search engines are general coded in XML format, not HTML. However, a webmaster may create a sitemap structure with HTML for their visitors. For WordPress users, this can be easily done with the installation of Dagon Design Sitemap Generator. (Of course there are plenty of other sitemap plugins too.) Currently, the Dagon Design Sitemap Generator plugin is not an accepted sitemap, however, there is a great plugin that Google recognizes, which is the Google XML Sitemaps plug-in. Once one or both of the plug-ins mentioned have been installed, it is best to go to Google Webmaster Tools to inform them where to find the sitemap.

Sitemaps are not another new fad as they have been around for years. It was not until 2006, that search engine moguls like Google, Yahoo!, and MSN got together to create the guidelines behind a proper sitemap. Since then, sitemaps have been used as a vital technique for search engine optimization. Why? Well, as said earlier in the article, a sitemap would tell the search engine how fresh the content of a page is on any website and post it so internet users can find information they need. Sitemaps would recognize new material and direct crawlers to the information for indexing.

Outside Related Links:

Do you have a sitemap for your site? Any other benefits you can think of when having a sitemap for your site?

Related posts:

  1. Google Webmaster Tool Benefits
  2. How To Optimize Your Online Video Content
  3. Search Engine versus Social Networking Traffic?

About Nile Flores

Nile is 30 year old female from Southern Illinois. Nile is a mother of 1 son. She is also a web and graphic designer, who exclusively designs using WordPress. She is currently a student working for a Bachelors in Business. She also blogs at WPAddict.net and FamousBloggers.net

Connect with Nile at: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn

Nile has written 602 articles at Blondish.net.

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Comments (2)

  • Nile Flores (blondishnet) 's status on Sunday, 08-Nov-09 02:20:47 UTC - Identi.ca says:
    November 7, 2009 at 8:20 pm

    [...] The Importance of Sitemaps http://blondish.net/the-importance-of-sitemaps/ [...]

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  • Tweets that mention The Importance of Sitemaps | Blondish.net -- Topsy.com says:
    November 19, 2010 at 3:15 pm

    [...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Nile Flores, GoodNReadyToGo. GoodNReadyToGo said: RT @blondishnet: The Importance of Sitemaps http://blondish.net/the-importance-of-sitemaps/ [...]

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