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••••••>How important is a Site Map (Sitemap) for SEO and top rankings?

Guest post by: David Josephson

Article Overview: It always amazes, me how even some large corporate websites ignore the importance of a Sitemap. There are of course 2 different types of "Sitemaps", there is the one that your website audience of humans rely on to quickly hone in on some specific information on your website, and then there is the one that is used just by the Search Engine Spiders or Web Crawlers

••••••>How important is a Site Map (Sitemap) for SEO and top rankings?

It always amazes, me how even some large corporate websites ignore the importance of a Sitemap. There are of course 2 different types of "Sitemaps", there is the one that your website audience of humans rely on to quickly hone in on some specific information on your website, and then there is the one that is used just by the Search Engine Spiders or Web Crawlers.

For this SEO tip we will concentrate on the file used exclusively by the search engine crawlers, most often in XML format, and generally called sitemap.xml. This file needs to always be placed at the root level of your website for the search engine web crawler to find and parse. Your website’s site map contains all the information that the search spiders need/use to locate each and every page (at least the ones that you desire to be found) in your website and index those pages.

Webmasters, Web Developer and SEO companies will always want to assure that ALL pages of your website are included that you want to be found in the Search Engines, pages that you want Google, Yahoo, Bing etc to "index". Once a Google and the other search engines spider the sitemap, it will determine what pages to index and they can be found in the search engines in the results of web searches. Providing all structural elements are in place, Meta tags are done correctly, content is new and fresh, CSS resides in separate files, basically if your pages meet all the standards required of the Search Engine Algorithms it will then have an excellent chance of appearing on page 1, or even in #1 on Google.

Submitting sitemap to the search engines is quite simple, varying slightly from one search engine to the other. Each of the big 3 Google, Yahoo and Bing have Webmaster centers where you can keep track of your website(s) and associated information. You can see when your sitemap file was last submitted, last downloaded and exactly how many pages it contains and how many of these pages the search engines have decided to index. By assuring all pages of your site are included in the sitemap.xml file, you will at least know that each of the search engines are aware of all the pages within your site, whether linked or not. Sitemaps are an excellent way to assure that if one of your website’s pages is buried deep inside the structure of your web site are found and indexed. Sometimes you may just have 1 link to the page or certain occasions maybe you have not even linked to it, including it in the sitemap file will assure that the search engine is s ware and increases the chances tremendously of the page being indexed.

Sitemaps are a simple but powerful part of SEO and the boost you achieve for raising the amount of pages found and indexed on your website can not be stressed enough. Remember, traffic to your website comes form Web Exposure, one of the best place for high web exposure is on top of the search engines, aka being #1 in Google!

Related Articles
  Create a Sitemap to Get your Site Indexed
  The Importance of a Sitemap
  ••••••>Make sure you have a Valid Updated Sitemap(s) for SEO and Better Web site Navigation
  How a Sitemap Differs From a sitemap
  Search Engine Optimization for Google

Article Tags: Best NY SEO, SEO



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Re: Alexa Ranking Goals - Thanks for posting the rankings again Evan I think that sometimes the rankings fluctuate without any apparent reason, I do post to my blog on a regular basis at least 3-4 times a week and still the rankings seem to go up and down. I guess that all helps to keep us on our toes. David how do you juggle all those sites and still find time to read? MichelleJ
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Re: Quick Ways To Utilize SEO Effectively - There are many different types of content: blog content, website content, newsletter content, audio & video content, the list can be endless. I'll just list 10 types of website content here: * Index/Introduction * Product Descriptions * Testimonials * Reviews * Resources * How-to Information * Downloads * Contact Information * Navigation/Site Map About/Company Info Anchor text as the others have said is the hyperlinked words on a web page - the words you click on when you click a link. Anchor text is important because it tells the search engines what the page is about. Used wisely, it boosts your rankings in search engines, especially in Google.If you use "click here" as the words people are going to click on, you're telling people the page is about the subject "click here", which is not the phrase you want to rank highly for, the text you need to use is a keyword that you have chosen for your website, blog or article. Take care, Carol
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