Why Sitemaps Important

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Sitemap is a web page that lists all the web pages on a website, typically organized in hierarchical way. Sitemaps is one of the tips to optimize your site for SEO. Sitemap is just a map of your website where you display structure of site within a page. An updated sitemaps is better for your users and engines as well. In robots.txt you tell engines which parts of your site to exclude from indexing, in your site map you tell search engines where you'd like them to go.

Site maps are not just a part of your part of your website that displays only structure but its part of best web design practice. When we talk about search engines, now its more important to have a sitemap with your website. So, from SEO view point sitemaps are very important. Both MSN and Yahoo keep to the standard html format while Google Sitemaps uses a special (XML) format that is different from the ordinary html sitemap for human visitors.

Now, there is question that why two sitemaps are important. Answer is very simple, and that is one you have for human visitors and second one you have for spider. In relation with duplicate contents with two sitemaps, in introduction to sitemaps, Major search engine defines in its introduction that using sitemap never lead to penalty for your website.

Why use sitemap is important for your website.

There are many benefits of using a site map. Site map not only makes your navigation easier but its also a better visibility by engines. Sitemap also enable you to inform engine about the current updates within your website. You cannot expect that search engine will not index your updates but using a sitemap the process will be faster as compared to your don't have a sitemap and spider has to search whole of your contents.

When you have sitemap with your site and you submit it to engines then you not to rely on external links that will bring engine to your website for indexing purpose. Sitemaps also help your with internal links. Like within your site if you have accidentally broken internal links that cannot be reached in other way (better it would be you have to fix your internal errors and then you rely on sitemap for better ranking).

Now if your website is quiet new and you have number of new or currently updated, then use of sitemap can be vital to reach your goal. Yes, right now you can move without any sitemap but in future it seems that it would be the standard way to submit your website for indexing purpose. It's apparent that spiders will continue to index your contents and sitemap can not remove crawling procedures but in future importance of sitemap will remain same.

Sitemap is a better way to let engine know the structure of website. It helps the engines find pages that may have not been properly linked throughout the rest of the site. In webmaster guidelines, engine (Google) touts the merits of adding a sitemap to your site.

Google sitemap was released in summer 2005. Website's page might be deleted from the index, and the Webmaster had no idea why before that. A site's content could be scanned, but because of the peculiarities of the algorithm, the only pages that would rank well would be the About Us, or it would be your company's news/press releases. The steps you need to perform in order to have a sitemap for your site are simple. First, you need to generate it, then you upload it to your site, and finally you notify Google about it and that's it.

How to generate and submit the sitemap

There are few simple steps you have to perform to have a sitemap for your existing site. First and important is to generate it then off course after generating your sitemap you have to upload it to your website and now final step is to let engine know what you have done.

Now all it depends upon your technical capabilities, to generate a sitemap you have two ways. First what you have to do is to download and install it and the second one is to use online sitemap generation tool for your site. The first method (to download and install) is little difficult but you have more control over the output by using first method. Google sitemap generator can be downloaded from here (http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=137793&package_id=153422). When you download the package, you have to follow the configuration instructions and installation procedure. If you download Google sitemap generator then you see, this sitemap generator is Python script. You need to inform you hosting company to install Python 2.2 at your web server in order to utilize the script, otherwise that will not run.

Lets talk about second method, that is easier way to generate a sitemap for your site. Yes, there are many free online tools available on sites from where you have to download the tool and you have not to do anything by yourself that job is not yours, just download tool and it will perform all necessary tasks. Have a little look at third party sitemap tools (http://code.google.com/sm_thirdparty.html). Also Google lets you know that its not tested and nor verified but still I would say its useful for you. There are many online links provided in it. Through these links you can navigate to download sitemap generators, sitemap plugins for popular CMS (Content Management System) and online generators etc. So, from (http://code.google.com/sm_thirdparty.html), you can easily find according to your requirement.

Once you have done with creating a sitemap, you need to load it at your web site if it is not already present and more important is to inform Google that sitemap is present on my site. How to inform Google that you have loaded sitemap within your website? That is simple, just hit link (https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin?service=sitemaps&hl=en&continue=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2Fwebmasters%2Ftools%2Fsiteoverview&nui=1). Now if you do not have Google account before, right now you have to open account with Google.

For instance: Two major Search engines (MSN and Yahoo!) are not supporting sitemaps or at least not in XML format. You can submit a text file with list of URLs for Yahoo. But not even providing that feature, there are rumors about MSN engine that it is indexing sitemaps when you have on your site. Logically I am saying that in future Yahoo and MSN has to enable same feature for indexing your site because it is becoming a powerful SEO tool and you cannot obsolete it.