SEO With Google Sitemaps

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SEO With Google Sitemaps

What is a Google Sitemap?

A Google Sitemap is a very simple XML document that lists all the pages in your website, but the Google Sitemaps program is actually much more important than that. In fact, the Sitemaps program provides a little peek inside Google’s mind – and it can tell you a lot about what Google thinks of your website!

Why Should You Use Google Sitemaps?

Until Google Sitemaps was released in the summer of 2005, optimizing a site for Google was a guessing game at best. A website’s page might be deleted from the index, and the Webmaster had no idea why. Alternatively, a site’s content could be scanned, but because of the peculiarities of the algorithm, the only pages that would rank well might be the “About Us” page, or the company’s press releases.

As webmasters we were at the whim of Googlebot, the seemingly arbitrary algorithmic kingmaker that could make or break a website overnight through shifts in search engine positioning. There was no way to communicate with Google about a website – either to understand what was wrong with it, or to tell Google when something had been updated.

That all changed about a year ago when Google released Sitemaps, but the program really became useful in February of 2006 when Google updated it with a couple new tools.

So, what exactly is the Google Sitemaps program, and how can you use it to improve the position of your website? Well, there are essentially two reasons to use Google Sitemaps:

Sitemaps provide you with a way to tell Google valuable information about your website

You can use Sitemaps to learn what Google thinks about your website

What You Can Tell Google About Your Site

Believe it or not, Google is concerned about making sure webmasters have a way of communicating information that is important about their sites. Although Googlebot does a pretty decent job of finding and cataloging web pages, it has very little ability to rate the relative importance of one page versus another. After all, many important pages on the Internet are not properly “optimized”, and many of the people who couldn’t care less about spending their time on linking campaigns create some of the best content.

Therefore, Google gives you the ability to tell them on a scale of 0.0 to 1.0 how important a given page is relative to all the others. Using this system, you might tell Google that your home page is a 1.0, each of your product sections is a 0.8, and each of your individual product pages is a 0.5. Pages like your company’s address and contact information might only rate a 0.2.

You can also tell Google how often your pages are updated and the date that each page was last modified. For example your home page might be updated every day, while a particular product page might only be updated on an annual basis.

What Google Can Tell You About Your Site

Having the ability to tell Google all this information is important, but you don’t even need to create a sitemap file in order to enjoy some of the perks of having a Google Sitemaps account.

That’s because even without a Sitemap file, you can still learn about any errors that Googlebot has found on your website. As you probably know, your site doesn’t have to be “broken” for a robot to have trouble crawling it’s pages. Google Sitemaps will tell you about pages it was unable to crawl and links it was unable to follow. Therefore, you can see where these problems are and fix them before your pages get deleted from the index.

You can also get information on the types of searches people are using to find your website. Of course, most website analytics tools will give this information to you anyway, but if the tool you use doesn’t have this feature, then it’s always nice to get it for free from Google.

But the best part of the Sitemaps program is the Page analysis section that was added in February of 2006. This page gives you two lists of words. The first list contains the words that Googlebot associates with your website based on content on your site. The second list contains words that Googlebot has found linking to your site!

Unfortunately, Google limits the number of words in each list to 20. As a consequence, the inbound links column is partly wasted by words such as “http”, “www”, and “com” – terms that apply equally to all websites (hey Google, how about suppressing those terms from the report?). That said, this list does provide you with a way to judge the effectiveness of your offsite optimization efforts.

When you compare these two lists, you can get an understanding of what Google thinks your website is about. If the words on your Site Content column are not really what you want Googlebot to think about your site, then you know you need to tweak your website’s copy to make it more focused on your core competency.

If, on the other hand your inbound links don’t contain any keywords that you want to rank well for, then perhaps you should focus your efforts in that direction.

Above all else, you really want these two lists to agree. You want your inbound linked words to match up to the site content words. This means that Google has a clear understanding of the focus of your website.

Additional Benefits of the Sitemaps Program

Google has even started notifying Sitemaps-participating Webmasters if they are breaking any of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. This can be very valuable information if your site suddenly becomes de-listed on Google and you don’t know why.

Only Sitemaps participants can get this information, and it is only provided at Google’s discretion. In fact, Google will NOT notify you if you are creating worthless websites that offer no original content, or if you are creating thousands of doorway pages that are redirecting to other web sites. Google doesn’t want to give the sp@ammers any clues as to how to improve their techniques.

How Do You Get Started with Google Site Maps?

The first thing you must do is obtain a Google Account. If you already have a Gmail, Adsense, or Adwords account, then you are all set. If not, you can register an account by visiting the Google Accounts page (https://www.google.com/accounts/NewAccount).

Building your sitemap file is pretty easy to do if you are familiar with XML, and if you aren’t you can always use a third-party tool such as the ones that are listed on Google’s website (http://code.google.com/sm_thirdparty.html). Google also has a “Sitemap Generator” that you can download and install on your server, but unless you are fairly adept at managing Python scripts, you should probably stick to the third-party tools.

At any rate, once you have your Google Account and your Sitemap file built, the rest is very easy. All you have to do is:

Log into your account (http://google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/siteoverview)

Type your website’s URL into the “Add Site” box and click on “OK”

Click on the Manage Sites link for the website you are adding, and add your sitemap file to your account.

Google Sitemaps – An Excellent SEO Tool

Google Sitemaps help Googlebot quickly find new content on your website. They allow you to tell Google what’s important, what’s new, and what changes often. The tools provided to webmasters through the program can play a vital role in helping you understand how the search engines (especially Google) view your website.

Using this information you can dramatically improve the position of your website and quickly clear up any issues Google finds. You can also use the tools provided by Google to gauge the effectiveness of your off-site optimization efforts so you can better focus your time and energy on activities that bring you the most success.

Find More Google Optimization Articles

Google Sitemaps – How important are they?

admin    Google     Google, Important, Sitemaps, They

There is no denying that Google is the king of the hill when it comes to search engines. A fairly decent page ranking in Google is worth so much more than a better showing in other less prominent search engines. The reason for this is the overwhelming popularity of Google. A vast majority of internet users use Google’s services in looking for quality content on the internet. With the large number of people using it, a high page rank acts a great advertising opportunity for your website.

Because of the astounding amount of websites that submit their web pages to Google, the think tanks at Google decided to come out with Google Sitemaps. This service, which was started in June 2005, makes web page submissions to Google much easier but with the added bonus of getting detailed reports regarding the submitted page’s visibility in Google. With Google Sitemaps webmasters can continually inform Google about their web pages as well as any changes that they make to help improve their standing in Google. This program serves as complementary service to Google’s regular crawl, although it is considered that using Google Sitemaps can do a better job than the regular crawl.

Google decided to come out with the Google Sitemaps program as a way for the search engine to offer better search results to its users. With the current limitations of web crawling, usually not all pages are discovered. It is also difficult to determine if a page has changed. With so many uncontrollable variables, crawlers sometimes just make guesses. With Google Sitemaps it becomes easier to get a better picture of all the possible URLs in a website as well as the frequency of the changes that are made. Knowing these variables makes searching in Google a more robust and fruitful experience because users are assured that they always get a fresh index of web pages.

To take advantage of the Google Sitemap program, webmasters only need to download a free open-source tool called Sitemap Generator that helps in creating a Sitemap using the Sitemap protocol. Google hopes that webservers will eventually support the protocol so that webmasters will not take any other extra steps to in order to join the program.

Google Sitemaps also freely accepts codes taken from or generated by third party providers and even lists down all of the available third party software within the Google Sitemap pages.

XML-Sitemaps.com is one such provider that provides a free Google sitemaps generator for webmasters which will also produce a HTML site map.

Google’s software and service developers are continually tweaking and improving the Google Sitemap program to better address the needs of webmasters. Because of this, new features are continually added to the Sitemap program.

Some of the new features that have been incorporated now revolve around the reporting aspect of Google Sitemap.

When a site has been verified, Google can show webmasters the statistics and errors about the website as well as the web pages. Among the information that would be included are:

The URLs that Google had trouble crawling including the reason why. Also included are the top queries that resulted in returns from their websites as well as those that brought traffic to their sites.

The web page’s PageRank distribution

The common text in external anchors that other websites used to link to their websites.

These new features, as well as others that are still being developed, brings tremendous advantages for webmasters because it makes the task of running a website so much easier. It also simplifies certain tasks that webmasters need to do to better manage their website’s page ranking. Ultimately, it gives their websites better exposure as well as the inclusion of more of their web pages in Google’s index.

Five Ways to Promote Your Business Online — Part V: Sitemaps & How They Can Improve Your Website Rank

admin    Google     business, Five, improve, Online, Part, Promote, Rank, Sitemaps, They, Ways, Website

What Is a Sitemap?

A sitemap is a page or group of pages that maps your site for users and “search engine spiders,” or “robots.” A sitemap is a list of internal links to user-accesible pages on a website. Think of it as a roadmap for your visitors. Sitemaps increase you site’s usability by clarifying its navigation structure. An XML or ROR version of a website’s sitemap is often kept in the root directory of the site for submission to search engines.

How Can a Sitemap Help Your Website’s Page Rank?

As stated above, and XML or ROR version of your web’s sitemap is kept in the root directory. Search engines use your sitemap.xml or sitemap.ror to quickly index the pages on your site. (You can customize the sitemap so that certain pages are not indexed.)

A sitemap does several things to help make your website noticeable to search engines:

A sitemap tells search engine spiders what pages of your site to index.

A sitemap tells search engine spiders how often to check your website for changes.

A sitemap makes your page more “search engine friendly,” which can help to improve your site’s page rank.

Web design tools like Adobe Dreamweaver can help you create a sitemap. Another alternative is to use  a free tool like XML-Sitemaps.com. This site creates a an XML, ROR and HTML sitemap that is Google friendly. All you need to do is enter your website’s URL and press the start button. It crawls your site and generates your sitemap. All that is left is for you to download the sitemaps it generates and upload them to your website’s root directory for the search engine to find. One thing to note is that the XML or ROR version of your sitemap is designed for search engines. For human visitors, use the HTML sitemap.

Remember, you want your site to attract attention to your business. Don’t let poor navigation and the lack of a good sitemap detract from your customer’s experience.

Search Marketing 101: The Importance of Sitemaps

admin    Google     Importance, Marketing, Search, Sitemaps

While there are several on-page and off-page search engine optimization techniques that play an important role in garnering higher page rank and link popularity, the importance of an often forgotten technique is usually underestimated – sitemaps. Simply put, these are a map of your website, a single page (or hierarchy of pages) that show the complete structure of your website along with the various sections, the main and secondary links and other details. A good sitemap helps visitors to your site, navigate your site easily.

Moreover, having an updated sitemap on your website helps not only your visitors, but the search engines too. Consider sitemaps to be a unique way to communicate with the search engines and telling them where you’d like them to crawl on your website.

Sitemaps and Search Engines

Sitemaps have been around for many years now and despite the fact that they are not a novelty, it’s only after the search engines adopted them that they have suddenly caught the eye of all good webmasters as part of their search engine optimization strategy. If you simply want to use sitemaps for search engine optimization purposes, then conventional HTML site maps are not for you. For example: Google Sitemaps should be written in XML, which is very different from the regular HTML site maps that are used for website visitors.

So does this mean that you need to have two sitemaps for your website? The answer is – Yes. One site map is for Googlebot or the Google spider, while the other is for your visitors. You should also be aware that having two sitemaps is not considered to be duplicate content and this has been made explicitly clear by Google, as it has stated that having two site maps will not lead to any penalty for your website.

In November 2006, the top three search engines (Google, Yahoo! and MSN) came together to create an industry standard for site maps for all websites. This standard was named ’sitemaps 0.90.’ For all those webmasters who wish to get their sites indexed by these top search engines, following the protocols laid down in sitemaps 0.90 is a prerequisite.

Generating and Submitting Sitemaps To Search Engines

Once you have your website ready with your XML site map, you need to upload your website to your server and then notify Google, through Webmaster Tools, where your sitemap lives . Typically, there are two ways of generating a site map.

1. You can install a sitemap generator script on your website.

2. You can use an on-line sitemap generation tool to create one.

Though the first option is difficult it offers you more control over the final result. Google Sitemap Generator is a good tool that can be used for generating a site map. Since the tool is coded in Python script, you need to have Python 2.2 version on your web server to run it.

The second method of generating a site map while being easier doesn’t give you much flexibility. Google also suggests some 3rd party Sitemap tools but warns users that it has not tested or verified them. Having created a site map, it’s time to upload it to your website and let Google, Yahoo and MSN know about it.