SEO: Why Use Sitemaps?
Yesterday, I advocated the idea that you should always use a sitemap on your blog to be sure that all your permalink pages are indexed. But what is a sitemap and why is it so important?
A sitemap gives search spiders information about your website. It tells the bots what pages are on your site, when they were last changed and when it’s likely that they’ll change again. Search bots love information that updates frequently, and it’s part of the reason why spiders love blogs. If you’re blogging consistently, and using keywords associated with your niche you’ll find yourself in the results pages pretty easily, providing you’re not competing for terms that are uber competitive.
Sitemaps also give spiders information about pages that they might not discover otherwise, which is great, and sitemaps allow you to prioritize your pages, if you want to do that.
The bottom line is that they just provide more information and make it easier for spiders to crawl your site. The easier you make it the more likely it is that they’ll discover everything that you want them to. If you’re using flash, or Ajax for example, having a sitemap is mandatory. Otherwise, you might lose the opportunity of having your page crawled at all because spiders find information in those formats hard to parse.
Having a sitemap doesn’t totally guarantee that your page will be indexed, it just increases the likelihood.
Sitemaps are easy to create, whether for a blog (get Google XML Sitemaps plugin) or a website. Just go to http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ where you can set priorities, and the dates/rates of change for your website. Then, take the file and upload it to your root directory via FTP. It’s really simple.
To make this more powerful, you should have a Google Webmaster account. It’s free to set up, and when you do, you give it the URL of your sitemap and you’re all set. XML-Sitemaps.com will index up to 500 pages for you for free. It’s a great deal. Totally take advantage of it.
