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Archive for February 5th, 2010
Sitemaps and SEO
Creating an HTML sitemap and a XML sitemap for your website
could be the easiest thing you do to improve your exposure on
the web. For those of you who pay close attention to the search
engine optimization (SEO) of your site, this could be the one
thing that gets you onto the first page of Google’s results. For
those who don’t devote too much time on the SEO of their site -
this is a good place to start. By submitting a sitemap to
various search engines, you are telling them that you exist and
what pages your site has to offer the World Wide Web.
There are two types of sitemaps, HTML and XML. An HTML sitemap
provides a useful directory of all the pages that are in your
site. While XML sitemaps play an important role in helping the
search engine “crawl” the various pages of your site. This
Roadmap discusses the benefit of creating both an HTML sitemap
and XML sitemap, and how you can go about creating them using a
sitemap generator.
HTML Sitemaps
An HTML sitemap is a single HTML page that contains links to all
the pages of your website. Normally, this is accessible via a
link in your site footer, where it will be displayed on every
page. With large sites, it is easy to get lost and struggle to
find the page you are looking for. With a well organized HTML
sitemap, your site visitors will be able to use this to easily
find the page they are looking for.
From an SEO perspective, as the search engine’s robot (or
spider) crawls your site indexing pages, it may find some pages
on your site easier using this sitemap, rather than through the
general navigation. Therefore, sitemaps can benefit your site
visitors and even play a role in enhancing your exposure on the
web.
Take a look at WebAssist’s sitemap (http://www.webassist.com/
sitemap.php) to get an idea of what an HTML sitemap looks like.
Notice that each page on the WebAssist website contains a link
to this page in the footer.
XML Sitemaps
HTML sitemaps are designed to benefit your human site visitors,
whereas XML sitemaps are created specifically for the search
engines. All of the most popular search engines including
Google, Yahoo and Ask.com utilize XML sitemaps
(http://www.webassist.com/dreamweaver-extensions/surveyor/?WAAID=898)
as part of their process for indexing the pages of a website. A
good XML sitemap will tell the search engine what pages are in
your site, how often those pages are updated, and when they were
last modified. This way, the search engines know which pages to
revisit more regularly, and are likely to do a better job of
indexing them. Here’s an example of the XML you might include
in your XML sitemap:
Notice that for the index.htm page of this website, we have
provided details regarding the last modified date (
the frequency that this page is updated (
priority of this page in relation to the other pages of our site
(
possible to the search engine, they will be better equipped to
index your site, and give the correct pages the appropriate
attention.
TIP: Be honest about the information you provide in your
sitemap. If a search engine finds that you are not updating your
site as often as your sitemap suggests, they may come back less
often.
Creating both HTML and XML Sitemaps
Creating HTML sitemaps is as easy as creating a basic HTML page
that contains links to all the pages in your site. However, you
need to keep in mind that whenever you create new pages in your
site, you will want to add those links on the sitemap as
well.
Creating XML sitemaps manually can be quite a time consuming
process. However, there are many great sitemap generators out
there to help you automate this. If you Google “sitemap
generator” (http://www.webassist.com/dreamweaver-extensions/
surveyor/?WAAID=898) you will find that there are a number of
free and paid sitemap tools that you can use.
Here at WebAssist, we have developed Surveyor to help you create
both HTML sitemaps and XML sitemaps. Surveyor is a Dreamweaver
extension that you can use as part of your website development.
For Dreamweaver users, this is the easiest and most efficient
way to create sitemaps. Surveyor includes multiple step-by-step
interfaces that guide you through creating your sitemap with all
the necessary details, and then submits your sitemap to the five
most popular search engines on the web. Surveyor even includes a
reminder tool that you can schedule to alert you when it is time
to submit an updated sitemap.
How Often Should I Submit My Sitemap?
You should be in the habit of submitting a sitemap to search
engines a number of times a year. This allows you to update the
search engine on any new pages in your site. If you create new
pages on a regular basis, you may want to submit your sitemap
more frequently.
Conclusion
Both HTML sitemaps and XML sitemaps are a good step in the right
direction to improve your website’s exposure. You will most
likely find your search engine rankings climb after submitting a
sitemap for the first time. However, keep in mind that this is
only one part of search engine optimization, and there is a lot
more you can do to improve how search engines rank the pages on
your site and your website’s discoverability.
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