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.
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.
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.
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
SEO Elite: SEO Software
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