Benefits Of Having A Sitemap

November 27, 2007 by Ruth
Filed under: Affiliate Marketing 

Sitemap generators can be downloaded from various sources on the Internet.  Sitemaps have two fundamental purposes.  It help surfers navigate a site effectively.  At the same time, a sitemap encourages search engine spiders.  Google offers one of the most popular sitemap generators online.

The sitemap generator google has makes it possible for a website to get listed and get updated by google’s search engine.  Setting up a sitemap helps speed up the addition of the web pages of a site to the google listing.  It also makes it easier for a site to get noticed by online surfers.  In addition, any changes made to a website that has a sitemap has the potential to be picked up by google immediately.  It also helps keep online information fresh and up-to-date for users.

Visibility is a major concern online.  A website that is completely indexed has better chances of getting top search engine placement in page results.  Many of the popular browsers used by searchers and that support java recognize sitemaps.  These include Firefox and Internet explorer. 

An online consumer that searches for  specific content on the web can immediately be directed to any one of the web pages of a particular site.  It’s easier for a search engine to provide accurate results from web pages they are familiar with.

A sitemap is highly recommended for websites that often do repeated modification of their web pages.  It can be used for websites of any size, regardless of the number of web pages a site may contain.

Although using a sitemap is not a guarantee of increased site rankings, it does however provide the website a better opportunity of getting listed in the search engines.

Most of the sitemap programs available on the web make use of extensible markup language or XML.  Similar to hypertext markup language or HTML, XML is used widely in blogs and syndicated feeds on the Internet.  Each line of a XML code for a sitemap has a specific purpose.

The location or <.loc> identifies the name of the web page of a website.  The line <.lastmod> indicates when the web page was last modified. T he format for <.lastmod> can either be dd.mm.yyyy, dd.mm.yyyy hh:mm, dd/mm/yyyy or dd/mm/yyyy hh:mm.

<.changefreq> advises the search engine of a specific time frame when the web page is regularly updated.  This can either be done on an hourly, daily, weekly, monthly or yearly basis.  For web pages that are not updated, the value ‘never’ is used. <.priority> indicates the level of priority that a search engine should give a particular web page of a website. These levels range from 0.0 for least priority to 1.0 for high priority.

Creating a dynamic sitemap is useful for websites containing various web pages.  Google’s search engine makes it easy for users to adapt their google sitemap with the help of a python script.

The python script generates a sitemap using sitemap protocol.  This creates a sitemap from either access logs, URL lists or from web server directories.

As one of more popular search engines offering a sitemap generator for websites on the Internet, google offers a few tips for its users.  Using the google sitemap url encoder/decoder is helpful for submitting sitemaps to google.  For websites that have numerous web pages, creating a sitemap can be a tremendous task.  For this situation it is best to click on the column title in order to make it easier for a URL list to get sorted.

The google sitemap generator allows users to save their settings.  Users can use these saved settings as a guideline for succeeding sitemap updates. The sitemap generator also recognizes the use of robots.txt files.

Using a sitemap is a positive move in getting top ranking on the Internet’s top search engines as well as high visibility among online users. 

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