You may have read about SEO and discussed many ways to optimize your website. One of the areas that has not been explored thoroughly but is extremely beneficial in getting you the desired ranking is using sitemaps.

Wonderful SEO Tool

As the name suggests, a sitemap is the map of your site. In a single page, you show your entire site, the links, the pages, sections etc. This is a wonderful SEO tool that helps a visitor navigate your site. Having a sitemap that is constantly updated to show what is new in your site is good.

Sitemaps have the added SEO advantage that they can help you communicate with search engines. You can use the sitemap to tell the search engine which parts of your site to crawl and index.

Sitemaps have been used since a long time for web design. Now since search engines pay attention to sitemaps, they have become important for SEO. If you want to use sitemaps, you need to remember that though MSN and Yahoo! Used the standard sitemap, google uses the xml format. So if you want to use sitemaps you need one for google spiders and one for the humans. One important thing is that Google has stated that it will never penalize websites for using sitemaps.

The benefits of using a sitemap :

Easier navigation Better visibility for search engines leading for faster indexing Sitemaps help in your website optimization since broken links can be repaired and orphaned pages reached. If you update a page, or have linked a new page, site map will help you immensely both with human visitors who can immediately read your fresh content and search engine spiders that sense and index your page. Better indexing and classification of site content How to get a SEO site map This is simple. You first need to generate it and then submit it to the search engine. There are tools to help you. You could download and install a sitemap generator. Google has one. If you are a technical person or have technical help it is simple. Otherwise, you could get online sitmap generator tools, that will walk you through the process. I use Arne Brachold’s XML Sitemap Plugin for WordPress.

Once you have created or generated your SEO sitemap, you need to notify google about it. If you have a Google account, add your site to the Google Sitemap account. If you do not have a google account, you need to get one. Google then verifies you as the legitimate owner of your site and this adds to your indexing.

This SEO XML plugin generates a XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. This format is supported by Ask.com, Google, YAHOO and MSN Search.

More information about what XML-Sitemaps are and how they can help you to get indexed by the major search engines can be found at Sitemaps.org and the searchenginewatch blog.

If you have questions about XML-Sitemaps or run into problems, have a look at my Sitemaps FAQ.

As of now, Yahoo! and MSN do not support XML sitemaps, but knowing the popularity of Google search engine it is expected that they will soon support this format. Yahoo does offer webmasters a way to submit a text file of urls, which may be considered a basic version site map. MSN does not. However, this is a powerful tool and since Google does dominate the search engine niche, both of these search engines will soon start supporting this SEO tool.

So get yourself a SEO sitemap

to optimize your website both for your visitors and for the search engines. It is great SEO.

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