A search engine sitemap can help improve your rankings and drive more traffic to your website. Here is a quick primer on how a sitemap works, and how you can create your very own sitemaps and submit them to the search engines.
What are sitemaps? And how do they work?
Sitemaps are usually only necessary for big sites. A site with only 10 pages don't really need to have a sitemap as the search engines can easily find all the pages on the site. But a website with thousands of web pages will definitely need to have a sitemap as not all the links will be found by the search bots.
A sitemap is basically just a static web page or RSS feed that lists all the links of the website. Here is what you need to do to create a sitemap.
Method 1: Static sitemap.
This is the easiest and most straight forward method. All you need to do is to generate a static web page and put all your links in it. If you have more than 100 pages, separate your links and place them in different pages. For instance, you can have something like sitemap-page1.html, sitemap-page2, html and so on. The reason why you need to do this is because you don't want the search bots to "think" that your site consists of spammy links!
Method 2: XML sitemap.
An XML sitemap can be created so that the links are updated automatically. If you use WordPress, you can install Google's XML Sitemap plugin and the plugin will create a Google sitemap for your site. This map will update automatically when you publish new content.
Submitting sitemaps to search engines.
For static maps, you don't even need to submit them to search engines. Just place a footer link that points to the map and the search bots will find it and crawl all the links. You can, however, submit your XML sitemaps to the search engines if you like.
All the three major search engines (Google, Yahoo and Bing) allows you to create webmaster accounts. Create the accounts and then start adding your sites to your accounts. Once your sites have been added, you will be able to submit your sitemaps.
Note that submission doesn't necessarily help with faster indexing. It just helps the search bots to find all the content on your site. Improving rankings will depend on a host of other factors such as your site's link popularity and the relevancy of the content.
If you intend to grow your website to a large site with thousands of pages of content, make sure you create an XML sitemap early. This will ensure that there is little delay in indexing fresh content on your website. A shorter indexing time frame may lead to a boost in traffic.
Before submitting sitemaps to search engines, you need to host your website with a top web host. Read the latest WordPress web hosting review on topwebhostingreviews.org. Get to know the best WordPress hosting service.
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