Search Engine Sitemaps - Do You Have One For Your Site?

Today we’ll discuss the importance of Sitemaps (yes, with a capital S), and why it’s critical that you have one for your website and/or blog. The importance of Sitemaps has been debated time and time again (index speed wise), but there is certainly some truth to the idea that having a Sitemap created and uploaded will help your overall SEO strategy. Hey, if Google recommends having a Sitemap for your website, then it’s in your best interest to listen to them, right?

So what is a Sitemap?

The easiest way to think of a Sitemap and how the search engines see them is to think of a table of contents of a book or magazine. Can you imagine opening a book, and not seeing a quick way to get to where you want to go? Exactly. Search engines use Sitemaps in basically the same way. It allows the spiders (the little electronic creatures that crawl your website) to find out about all of the URL’s within your site, and informs them of how your linking structure is laid out. Just from the above comparison, you probably realize how important it is to have one of these for your site. Making it hard for search engine spiders to crawl your site is the last thing you want - so why not make it easy for them?

As Google says:

Sitemaps are particularly helpful if:

• Your site has dynamic content.
• Your site has pages that aren’t easily discovered by Googlebot during the crawl process - for example, pages featuring rich AJAX or Flash.
• Your site is new and has few links to it. (Googlebot crawls the web by following links from one page to another, so if your site isn’t well linked, it may be hard for us to discover it.)
• Your site has a large archive of content pages that are not well linked to each other, or are not linked at all.

You can also use a Sitemap to provide Google with additional information about your pages, including:

• How often the pages on your site change. For example, you might update your product page daily, but update your About Me page only once every few months.
• The date each page was last modified.
• The relative importance of pages on your site. For example, your home page might have a relative importance of 1.0, category pages have an importance of 0.8, and individual blog entries or product pages have an importance of 0.5. This priority only indicates the importance of a particular URL relative to other URLs on your site, and doesn’t impact the ranking of your pages in search results.

Some people recommend that you don’t need to worry about uploading and submitting a Sitemap until you have 10+ pages on your site. But personally, I think you should include a Sitemap from the get-go. Again, why risk a spider not making it to all of your links?

So how do I get a Sitemap for my site or blog?

We’ll cover this in two parts. Regular websites first.

The first thing you need to do is go to a site that offers free sitemap generation. They’re all pretty much the same, so the directions pretty much apply across the board.

1. Enter your URL into the box provided.

2. Click “submit” or “start” or whatever the option is to generate the Sitemap.

3. Depending on how many pages you have, this could take anywhere from several seconds to several minutes.

4. When it’s done (using the above site as an example), you have a few options for which type of file to download.

5. I recommend downloading the “compressed” version (.xml.gz), as it is less stress on bandwidth for your site and Google, and it’s perfectly the same quality as the uncompressed version.

6. Now, you need to upload it to your websites main folder.

7. Finally, submit it to Google right here. (Through Google Webmaster Tools - if you don’t have a webmaster tools account, you need to sign up for one right away, it’s free).

For Wordpress Blogs, the process is just as easy, and it involves using a simple plugin called Google XML Sitemaps Generator.

1. Download plugin, unzip, and upload it into your plugins directory.

2. Read further on down the page from the download site above for further instructions. It’s really easy.

3. Submit it to the same link I mentioned for regular websites (in Google Webmaster Tools)

So that completes the easy steps it takes to have a live Sitemap for your website or blog. Again, it’s highly recommended that you implement this right away, as it can only benefit you. Now, there are some more advanced values and options you can change, (change frequency, etc…), but since this is a website dedicated to “noobs”, I’m not going to get into that. My goal is to make it as easy and painless as possible, and I think this post has done that quite clearly. If you’re interested in learning about the more advanced aspects of Sitemaps, I recommend reading this authority article which gives a nice detailed explanation of Sitemaps.

Most importantly, I hope this article has given you at least a general understanding of Sitemaps and why they’re important for your site. If you have additional questions, by all means post them in the comments and I or another reader will surely answer them to the best of our knowledge!

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