Sitemaps – Why they rock.

05 July 2007 - By Ahson Rafiq - Filled in SEO

Ok this a repost since my last post on it was deleted due to a hack attack.

We all make sites and then complain that its either not getting indexed or not getting the keyword it deserves, and most of the times 90% of my clients come without even having a sitemap, so this is to everyone out there “Submit sitemaps to google before going for professional SEOs“, its just so that you know you have done everything you can before you got some professional help on these matters.

Why Sitemaps

We use sitemaps because we need to inform google of new/latest/updated posts and/or already present and ignored content, SEs will crawl your site completely overtime themselves but why wait when you can give them a map of the site and tell them that its all present there and is ready to be crawled/indexed?

SEs like Google crawl/index pages that are active only, in other words dugg or blogged about, i have done several experiments to prove this point as well, and to get the whole site indexed you will no doubt need a sitemap at any cost, whether you do it yourself or pay someone else to do it, it will be done eitherway :)

Submitting a Sitemap

Ok so we discussed how its good, now lets see how to submit one.

  1. Make a sitemap using SitemapsPal
  2. Copy paste the map into a notepad
  3. Save it as sitemap.xml
  4. Upload it to the root folder of your domain (must be accessible at http://domain.com/sitemap.xml)
  5. Go to Google’s Webmaster Area
  6. And submit. :)

And there ya have it, you can submit as many as you want.
Here is a screen shot of mine.

google-webmaster-tools-webmaster-tools_1183693118359.png

Ill discuss the errors on the sitemaps in a later post.

Sitemap Plugins

I am not much of a fan of the “sitemap plugins” for wordpress, most automated sitemap generators are considered as spam you google anyway, if you submit it manually through webmaster central you WILL see a bigger turnover.

You can read more of my SEO Tips for more topics.

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One Response to “Sitemaps – Why they rock.”

  1. Google Sitemaps on hault. Says:

    [...] i love sitemaps but lately none of my sitemaps are being downloaded by google’s bots, and all i see is the [...]

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