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How a Sitemap Differs From a sitemap

Written by: michelle crossley

Article Overview: Yes you read that correctly, and no, it’s not a typo. Many people often fail to distinguish between a Sitemap and a sitemap. In simple words, the sitemap for visitors gives an overview of the structural linkage of your website. Sort of a map or layout of your site for visitors to see how your site is laid out and help them navigate your site.

How a Sitemap Differs From a sitemap

Yes you read that correctly, and no, it’s not a typo. Many people often fail to distinguish between a Sitemap and a sitemap. In simple words, the sitemap for visitors gives an overview of the structural linkage of your website. Sort of a map or layout of your site for visitors to see how your site is laid out and help them navigate your site. However, a Sitemap with a capital S is a list of your web pages, which you should create and submit to major search engines like Google and Yahoo, so that the search engine robots are able to crawl the pages whose URLs may not have been discovered by the normal crawling process. Sitemaps are submitted in XML format will help Google to know about pages on your site that might not have been otherwise discovered or crawled. When you make any changes to your existing website by adding or deleting some web pages, you should resubmit your Sitemap to the search engines. Though many people often create a new Sitemap for every change, Google in particular doesn't recommend the same. Instead, it asks for a revised version to be submitted. As a recap, a Sitemap can help: * Improve your search engine optimization by ensuring that all your pages are found easily. * Increase your site’s visibility * Notify the search engine robots of any changes in the web pages or about the addition/deletion of content While a sitemap helps your readers to locate the required information quickly without leaving the site, a Sitemap makes the job of the search engine crawlers easier. Remember that the latter is not supposed to be accessible by visitors. So, you should allow only the search engine bots to access the XML Sitemap and not put a link to it from where visitors access it.

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  Understanding Sitemaps and How They Help Your Website
  Why Your Website Needs a Sitemap

Article Tags: How a Sitemap Differs From a sitemap, what is a sitemap, what is a sitemap used for, why I need a sitemap



Related Forum Posts
Brag: Over 100,000 page sitemap! - Every month I create a new sitemap for EvanCarmichael.com and submit it to Google. Once you hit 40,000 pages you have to start creating multiple sitemaps. I was pleased to find out that this month's sitemap came in at 101,773 pages - the first time we've ever crossed the 100,000 mark! Thank you so much for your contributions and help with the forums - all of your posts factor in as well! On to the next milestone!
Re: How can I promote my site? - [quote="smithndavis":2qlpkdk9]Do following to promote your site : 1) Use SEO techniques 2) Use more backlinks 3) Get a Google Sitemap on your blog to help to get it fully indexed 4) Participate in Related Forum Boards 5) Convert some of your existing articles into podcasts[/quote:2qlpkdk9] Again, I agree with all these. The fifth point is especially good, I think. I'd add that you can also turn your articles into videos and post them on YouTube and other video sites, and then embedding them in your blog.
Re: SEO... - 1: Find the Best Keywords 2: Discover Your Competitors 3: Optimize Your Title 4: Optimize Your META Tags 5: Use Headings 6: Use Title and ALT Attributes 7: Nomenclatures 8: Create a Site Map Page 9: Include a robots.txt File 10: Install a sitemap.xml for Google MySQL/Oracle:
Re: What's Up With Word Clouds? - Hi GT, Interesting topic. I too have seen word clouds more and more. I often wondered the same thing as you. They look kinda cool, but I'm not sure what the point is exactly. I suppose they could be sort of a sitemap of different categories or keywords. Other than that, I don't know what benefit there might be to use one. Wordpress blogs have a "Tag Cloud" widget. Does anyone know if it's beneficial to use it? The only useful thing I see with this is displaying all of your used tags on every page with your readers having easy access to them. I suppose that could be beneficial to both them and you. I'd like to hear other thoughts on this.
Getting links from the giants - Hi Kevin - it's simple - what do you have to offer them? What kind of compelling reason can you give them to link to you? According to my Google Webmaster Central Tools I have a total of 15,937 links to my site. 4,523 of them go to my homepage while the remaining 11,414 go to various pages on my site. My last sitemap indicated that I have 34,789 pages of content on my website so, excluding the homepage, I have about one link for every three pages of content. I think it’s important to also note that I don’t do any link buying and never tell people what anchor text to use when they link to me. I always suggest that they use whatever text they feel best describes the page they are linking to on my site (if everyone links to you with the same anchor text you can get penalized from Google). Having great content is one way to build links but usually you also need to take an active approach to marketing yourself. Can you build a section on your shoe site along the lines of "The Tennis Player's Ultimate Guide To Buying Shoes" where you talk about all the different considerations someone needs to make before buying shoes - and then at the end recommend Nike? In return Nike links to the site because it's a 3rd party endorsement of their products. Many big companies have News sections on their sites and always love showing off good news - you just need to find a way to give them something worth showing off!


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