Sitemaps
Does your web site have a sitemap? Search engine crawlers are just like travelers in a foreign land – they do a lot better when they have a map to see where they’re going. However, the sitemap is one of the most often overlooked components of a web site. It certainly isn’t particularly attractive or fun to read, but it sure helps Google and the other search engines find their way about – leading to a better picture in the search index of your web site.
If you have a Word Press blog like this one, there are various plugins you can use to generate a sitemap of your blog for you. I use two:
- Dagon Design Sitemap Generator – to produce a user-readable sitemap
- Google XML Sitemaps – to produce a search engine friendly sitemap file in XML format
Otherwise, producing your own sitemap is fairly easy but requires some skill with XML documents. There’s a lot of information about how to write a sitemap at www.sitemaps.org and also on the Google Sitemaps page.
You can see the sitemap for the Zenologue Blog here to get an idea of what a sitemap looks like in action.
Although a sitemap doesn’t necessarily mean an increased search engine ranking, if you haven’t already done so, I strongly suggest providing a sitemap on your site that will help both visitors and the search engines. You can register the sitemap with Google and the other major search engines, enabling them to crawl and index your site more effectively and quickly.
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