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Do you own a website? If so, then take a minute
to imagine the following scenario:
You've uploaded
your last set of pages to your website, and you have finally setup
your new income stream, fitted with your choice of products, payment
gateway and hundreds of pages of content designed to increase your
search engine rankings and hopefully give you some AdSense income.
You now focus
your attention towards link-building and other traffic building
techniques, and pretty soon you've got search engine spiders
crawling through your website.
Wait!
Have you built a
sitemap?
Yes, of
course.
But have you
built a sitemap that is:
-
Tailored to get your complete website indexed almost
instantly.
-
Guaranteed to improve your site rankings.
-
Compliant with the new Google Sitemap
format.
No?
That's what I thought ;-)
However, no need
to worry. I've got the perfect plan for you to prepare a sitemap
that will not only guarantee website indexing and ranking almost
instantly, but also tell you how to build a sitemap that complies
with Google's new Sitemap feature, thus further improving search
engine indexing of your website.
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Building a
perfect sitemap is a lot like building a perfect website - you need
to account for contextual grouping of your pages, hierarchical
linking between your pages, and most importantly, a clean, concise
format that provides search engine spiders with a super-fast
blueprint for indexing your website.
So how do you go about making a perfect
sitemap?
First, let's
revisit the philosophy behind sitemaps. Webmasters traditionally
used sitemaps to provide a 'guide to all pages on this site' in the
shape of a sitemap - if a visitor is lost, or wants to browse
through your website to look for information they are interested in,
they would use a sitemap.
That's great. In
fact, sitemaps can be very useful to help users
navigate through your website.
But isn't your
menu structure (or whatever navigational theme you have placed on
your website) supposed to do that?
The sitemap
is a backup - a failsafe that is activated if your first line of
help - The navigational structure of your website, doesn't help your
visitors.
Now I've always
said that the most important factor in creating a successful user
experience is to build a foolproof menu system, and to
organize pages on your website logically and intuitively so that
anyone can find what they are looking for within just a few clicks.
If you did all that, would your users really need a sitemap? Not
likely.
On the other
hand, a sitemap can be extremely useful to help search engines
index your website completely. In a typical scenario, when a
search engine spider will visit your site for the first time it
might fully index your website, but it will take a look at all the
links to your main page.
Now if one of
those links points to your sitemap, then the next time the search
engine spider returns to look for more web content and crawls those
links, it will definitely index your site map and subsequently, gain
access to all of your pages.
Remember... A site map does not
guarantee indexing of your web site; on the other hand, it ensures
that if you have done your SEO right (consistent link-building
and targeted web pages), a search engine spider will be more
likely to index the whole website instead of doing it partially
- in fact with the right format, you can almost 'hypnotize'
the spider into doing a complete crawl. This is assuming of
course, that the spider finds your website important enough
in the first place to have a look - something that can only
happen through a persistent link-building campaign.
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When creating your sitemap, keep the following points
in mind:
-
Create simple, clean HTML code.
-
Organize your website's content into contextual categories
- make simple lists and don't worry about ordering.
-
Ensure that your site map reflects the structure of your
website - i.e., the category headings on your website should
be the top level category pages on your website. This also means
that you should build a sitemap at the same time that you are
planning your website's structure and content.
-
Look at sitemaps of leading websites for an insight on how
to organize your links - the DevShed Sitemap is a great
example.
-
While a sitemap's main purpose is to organize all pages
of your website neatly on a single page, it will be helpful to
include a line or two describing the link - sort of like a links
page, only that this is for internal links, and not for outside
links. This will help users understand what the pages are about,
and keywords in these descriptions will help with search engine
algorithms which are starting to account for text surrounding the
links as well.
Google has
recently released a Sitemap Protocol, which will be used to
'supplement' the regular crawling process of GoogleBot, Google's
search engine spider. While the technical details of generating and
maintaining a Google compliant sitemap involve some serious
head-scratching, here's a summary of what placing such a sitemap
will do for your website.
The Google
Sitemap (GS) will contain usual information such as a list of
URLs, plus additional information about these URLs, such as
when they were last modified (content freshness), how
frequently they are changed (content "refresh rate") and the
importance of a particular URL in relation to other URLs in
the GS. Other tags, or pieces of information, are expected to be
added in future updates.
The GS Protocol
requires that your GS is in XML format. This allows you to store
information about each link in a format that search engine spiders
can reliably interpret and manipulate. Don't let this scare you.
I'll be sending you a video showing how to use a special, free,
software program to create a Google sitemap for you
:-)
There are other
concerns, such as the limit on the size of a sitemap, support for
multiple sitemaps and placement of the sitemap on your website,
which are discussed on the Google Sitemap page. From a webmaster's
point of view, it's important to note the benefits that such a
sitemap might have on search engine spider behavior regarding your
website.
The central aim
of the GS project is to allow webmasters to tell the search engines
the importance of their pages, and about how frequently they plan to
update their websites. Like all search engine technology, this is
open to abuse but it is also a powerful tool for new websites to
help with rapid search engine indexing.
By telling the
search engine spiders exactly which pages are most important, and
which pages are most like to have regularly updated fresh content,
you can simplify their job and will eventually be rewarded with more
"intelligent" crawling - ensuring that your most important pages get
indexed rapidly after they are updated by you.
Once you've created
your Google Sitemap (either through the Google Sitemap Generator
or a 'simpler' tool such as Site Map Pro) and placed it on your
website, you can submit your sitemap to Google. This page not
only helps you manage your Google sitemaps, but also shows you
when Google accesses them.
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If you have a
small website, manually editing your site map may not be a problem.
Heck, if you are a programmer, you can even work with Google's
Sitemap Generator and generate your very own Google Sitemaps. But if
you have a large website, or several websites, and if like me you
don't want to waste your time dabbling with code (i.e. you want to
stick to what you know best, which is running a successful online
business), you need an automated site map generator.
But you don't
need just *any* sitemap tool. To be effective, a sitemap
generator must have the following:
-
Ability to group your pages into themed categories.
-
Support of templates so that you can map your site
structure onto your sitemap.
-
Runs from your desktop - easier to use than having to run a
script from your website.
-
And of course - generates a Google
Sitemap.
Site Map Pro is
one of the few tools I'm aware of that does all this (and then some)
in a fraction of the time it would take you to create the sitemap
yourself. If you factor in the savings in time over the period of a
year (when you are busy putting up and maintaining several large
websites), the cost of such a tool is just a drop in the
ocean.
And as an added
bonus, the tool will also generate a Google Sitemap for you. There
is absolutely no knowledge of programming required; it's custom made
for online business owners like you and me who don't have the time
or patience to learn complex programming and technical details. If
you're tight on your budget and need a Google sitemap created, don't
buy this software for that purpose alone. I'll be showing you a
good, free, Google sitemap generator in a coming
lesson.
In the end, if
you do your job of designing your website right, your users wouldn't
need a sitemap. On the other hand, search engines have increased
their interest in sitemaps as a reliable option to learn more about
your website. With a properly configured sitemap and a Google
sitemap on your website, you'll be miles ahead of your
competition once the results of this cooperation with search engine
spiders start to kick in.
Stay tuned for the
video on creating a Google Sitemap.
I'll be sending you this in
the next few days!
All
the best,
Brad Callen
Professional SEO
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