All About Sitemaps By Seomul Evans At Isnare.com Ezine Articles

What is a sitemap? A website is a graphical chart showing a website’s architecture. There can be two different types of sitemaps. The first type can be a document in any form that can be used as a planning tool for web design. The second type of sitemap is a web page that lists all of the pages on a particular website. The second type of sitemap is normally organized in hierarchical fashion. A sitemap helps search engine bots and visitors find pages on a website. Many developers say that site index is a term that is more appropriately used to relay page function while web visitors are often used to encountering both terms. Web visitors often associate both of the terms as one and the same. The term site index often refers to an A-Z index that is capable of providing access to particular content. On the other hand, a site map normally provides a top down view of a website’s overall contents.

Sitemaps are often used for people who are trying to search engine optimize their web pages. Sitemaps are considered an essential aspect for anyone who is trying to optimize their website for the major search engines. Sitemaps are essential for websites that use Macromedia Flash or JavaScript menus since they do not include standard HTML links. Therefore, without a sitemap websites that rely on Macromedia Flash and JavaScript would not be able to be indexed properly or crawled properly by the major search engines. Many search engines are only able to follow a number of links from a page. Therefore, search engines might need a site map in order to access all of the content on sites that are large. Sitemaps are used with search engine optimization in order to ensure that all pages can be found. Having all pages finable by search engines means that your website will end up ranking high among the search engines.

Google has created Google Sitemaps which allows web develops to make a list a links from across websites and publish that list. Some websites has a large number of dynamic pages and some of these pages can only be access through the use of user entries and forms. The sitemap files are used by a web crawler to determine how these pages can be found. Sitemaps make it easier for search engines to access all of the pages on your site therefore making it easier for your pages to rank higher.

All of the major search engines now support the sitemaps protocol including Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask. All of these search engines use the same protocol which means that having a sitemap allows these search engines to have updated page information. Therefore you don’t have to worry about creating more than one sitemap for each of your websites. You only need to create one sitemap per website. You can use one sitemap for each of the search engines as they are capable of understanding the same language. You can use several free web based internet tools to create sitemaps for you automatically quickly and easily.

It should be noted that sitemaps will not guarantee that all links will be crawled. And just because a page is crawled doesn’t mean that it will be indexed. However, a sitemap is still the best way to ensure that a search engine knows about your entire website. Therefore, it is important for all websites to have a sitemap to ensure that all of the pages are known by a search engine. Besides, creating a sitemap for your website can be done quickly and easily using several free web based tools.

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