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Why Have a Sitemap?

By admin | June 2, 2008

Many webmasters overlook the importance of a sitemap. If a website has adequate navigation links connecting all the pages, a sitemap may, indeed, seem redundant. Search engine optimization theorists now say the sitemap is essential to good SEO. This is because it feeds the searchbots one page linking to every important page on your site. The link to this sitemap page needs to be right on the front page of your website.

Another consideration is that the sitemap gives a visitor an overview of the scope of your website. On one page they can see how you have covered your site’s themes. If they are lost, they often can find exactly the page they want by using the sitemap.

Forcing yourself to include the sitemap also forces you to keep organized and on theme for your site. When planning an addition, the sitemap can show you relevant connections to consider.

There is a different kind of site map in addition to the one viewed by your website visitors. This one doesn’t get a link on your front page and it just a file that sits in your domain public_html folder. This would be in a format specified by a particular search engine to facilitate their bots.
Google has one and you can find their webmaster tools here: http://www.google.com/webmasters/ Take the link to webmaster tools and see how to fix up your site to be Google optimized. There are other links on that page that may be of interest to you as well.

Yahoo used to request a .txt file site map, but this has changed. They now have “Site Explorer” beta where you can submit your site to their search engine here: https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit They accept the URL of your .xml sitemap as well as urllist.txt From this, I deduce that you no longer need separate sitemaps for both Google and Yahoo, but can actually use one for both.

Building the search engine sitemap can be a huge opportunity to see any broken links in your website and provides you and opportunity to decide which (if any) pages you might want to exclude from the search engines.

Always remember to update the sitemaps for the search engines when you add pages to your website!

Personally I think you are crazy not to have a site map. It’s another way you can directly submit your site to Google.

It’s easy as pie to have a sitemap using Wordpress and XML Sitemap Generator for WordPress 3.1.0.1  It’s totally automatic and the plugin even notifies Google with a ping when the site gets a new post.

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