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Understanding Sitemaps and How They Help Your Website
| Guest post by: Sue Cooper |
Article Overview: On-page sitemaps are the road map of your website. Are you providing easy directions for your visitors and the search engines?
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Free Download - Is Google Authorship A New Ranking Driver? By Sue Cooper |
Understanding Sitemaps and How They Help Your Website
As the name implies, a sitemap is basically a road map to your website which includes all of the subpages on the site. However, this road map consists of a series of links designed much like the index of a book. These links help to provide visitors to your website with an easy way to step through your site and determine the type of content and topics that are available to them.
There are a few ways to create a sitemap. Some website design software programs will automatically create a sitemap for you as the website is built. This is usually a quite simple process; however, care should be taken to avoid repeating terms throughout the sitemap. This can be difficult because there may be more than one page on a website which refers to a particular term. It may be tempting to repeat this term but doing so may cause your website to not be fully crawled by search engines.
Sitemaps can also be created manually. This process involves determining all of the subpages of the domain and ordering them in a logical sequence. Once this is done, you can use a text based software program or a spreadsheet program to compile this list. Active links to each of these subpages should also be included. Then this information can be copied and pasted into the code for the proper on-page sitemap.
This brings us to the subject of why sitemaps are beneficial in an SEO perspective. They are important because by compiling links to all of your subpages on one page, you provide the search engine with the opportunity to crawl through your entire website. For this reason it is extremely important to ensure your sitemap does not have any broken links. This is because when the search engine encounters a broken link it is likely to stop crawling the website. If the broken link is located high on your sitemap, it can result in the majority of your website not being crawled.
There are a few steps you can take to avoid broken links on your sitemap. One way to do this is to test the links regularly. Another way to avoid broken links is to take advantage of scripts which will automatically update your sitemap. This way you do not have to remember to make these changes manually each time you add or delete a page from your website.
Why sitemaps are important in SEO?
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••••••>How important is a Site Map (Sitemap) for SEO and top rankings?
Seo Basics
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Article Tags: search engines, sitemaps
Referred by: http://www.searchengineworkshops.com
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About the Author: Sue Cooper RSS for Sue's articles - Visit Sue's website Sue's passion is search engine optimisation, and as licensed associate of Search Engine Academy Queensland, conducts regular hands-on SEO training. Because of the low enrolment of all workshops, participants receive individual attention, learning the skills to take their website to new levels of sales growth and lead generation. Click here to visit Sue's website   White Hat vs Black Hat SEO Google Analytics Overview A Must Tool for Webmasters To Discover The Insights Of Their Website Google Search Parameters Search Effectively Using Important Parameters Social media why should my business use this resource LinkedIn The Power of Networking Applied to Online Business |
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Great suggestion from David, or you could try something around a design consultancy,
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