Sitemaps - Good for Users, Good for Search Engines
Allan Collins | 18 September 2006 |
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Have you ever wanted to find a page on a website, but didn’t want to click through a lot of links to find it? It’s ok, because you are not alone. Website visitors who are looking for something specific need to find it fast, or else they will give up and search elsewhere. What if there was a “Table of Contents” that a user could view to find what they are looking for?
That’s where a sitemap comes in to play. A sitemap is a page on a website that shows the site’s entire linking structure. For example, if a user needs to find a detailed page about a specific room, they could find the link on the sitemap.
Although a sitemap is beneficial to the user, it is also invaluable to a search engine. When a search engine spider sees every page on a web site, it can index it a lot easier.
Google has incorporated a sitemap of their own in XML form. The Google sitemap is a very valuable tool to have when it comes to search engine optimization in Google. Although other search engines haven’t picked up on Google’s concept yet, it’s still important to have a general sitemap for the rest of the world as well. Google has stated that having their sitemap and a general sitemap does not constitute duplicate content - it just helps Google’s spiders see what they need in a more efficient manner.
Allan Collins - Blizzard Internet Marketing, Inc.
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September 18th, 2006 at 4:10 pm
Yahoo! offers Yahoo! Site Explorer, http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/ , which is their beta counterpart of Google Webmaster Central (the new name for Google SiteMaps). Both of these services offer much more than XML site map services and are worth investigating further, particularly if you are concerned about the crawlability of your website.