Mar 29th, 2007
Adding Site Maps To Your Website
What are Site Maps?
Site maps are simply a list of all the pages that comprise your website, usually in a hierarchical format. You can think of it as analogous to a Table of Contents page in a book. There are two different types of site maps. HTML which is meant to be browsed by humans (search engines can read them too) and XML which is meant to be read by other computers.
Why would I want a Site Map?
In addition to assisting your visitors find content or information they are seeking there is another important reason to use site maps and thats for another type of visitor, spiders! Spiders are small programs used by search engines that continually scour the web looking for content to include in their listings.
A site map basically provides a nice tidy listing of your entire website that allows and ensures the spider will crawl all of your content. Note that this will not improve your rankings but it will ensure that all of your content is spidered and reduces the likely hood that your “orphan” pages are overlooked. Orphan pages are pages without any other pages linking to them making them hard for the search engines to find.
How do I make a site map?
Thankfully the days of having to manually generate a site map are long gone. Today there are great free tools that will do the task for you. My two favorites are below.
XML Sitemaps This site provides an excellent tool for generating both HTML and XML sitemaps.
Wordpress Site Map Generator - an excellent plug-in for wordpress that automatically generates a site map for your blog.
What do I do with my site new map?
Now that you have a site map you should submit it to the search engines. This ensures that the engines properly and fully index all the content listed on your site map. The two major search engines I recommend submitting your site map too is Google and Yahoo. You can follow the links below to find the submission forms. You will need a free account from their sites to use the services. Once you are logged in simply add your site and follow the directions.
Yahoo Site Explorer
Google Webmaster Tools
If you get lost post a comment and I will help you out.
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