Saturday

How To Use XML Sitemaps

This is important that you create it for your website. If you have a blog, not a website you still require to create it, if you are doing seo.

One good reason to do it, is for search engines especially Google. Google has a section specifically for webmasters where you can submit the xml sitemap of your website.

This helps Google search engine spider to find your website pages easier, helping your pages getting indexed faster. Plus Google will give you incredible amount of data about your website pages.

The xml sitemap consists of your website pages, all of them that you wish to get indexed. Means all pages that are worth being in the Google index.

The xml sitemap is submitted and used for Google. For Yahoo you create a so called URL list. That is a list of your website urls in a text file.

One of the tools to create both a xml sitemap for Google and the URL list for Yahoo is free. It is a web based tool.

There are software as well that creates the xml sitemap and the url list. Some are free.

So create the so called Sitemap and go to "Google webmaster tools" and submit it there. Inside you will see a ton of free tools and data about your website. Including those pages that Google recommends you fix. And other useful tips directly from Google to help your website rankings improve.

That's a bomb.

Now, the sitemap creator tool allows you to easily create the xml sitemap and the url list.

You will want to exclude the following from your sitemap. Once you use it, the tool will list all your website pages. Exclude then the following from the list (then you can generate the sitemap):

  • Login urls for members only areas.
  • Any page that has no useful value to the user.
  • Identical urls with just a trailing slash different at the end.
  • Any 404 pages the tool finds. They are marked in red.

This is really something I suggest you take the time to do. Then create a new sitemap again after a month (if you added new website pages), if not there is no need to re create a new sitemap. I also suggest you add new content regularly. The more the better, some do it daily, others 3-4 times every week.

As long as the content you create is original and has value the more you have the better.

Always think of your visitors when doing SEO. It's always the best approach rather than looking for shortcuts for high rankings, which often include cheating, which get your website or some pages penalized.

Keep in mind that this type of sitemap is used for the search engines only. For your website sitemap, that is also used mainly for the search engines nowadays. It's a great way for them to quickly find all the pages of your website.

Your visitors also benefit if they look at it. But you should really put just the main pages of your website alone, there is not need to input hundreds or thousands of pages if your website is that big.


Source by : Karl Sultana

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