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Getting your pages indexed. It is your most important SEO goal and perhaps the one most vital in determining the success of your SEO campaign. However, many search engines have trouble finding links buried deep within the structure of your site. So how do you make sure your pages are easy for the search engines to find? With a sitemap. Creating a sitemap provides the search engines with a one-stop-shop for all of the pages on your site. And if designed correctly, your sitemap can also be a valuable resource to lost visitors looking to understand your site structure.

What is a Sitemap?

A sitemap displays the inner framework and organization of your site's content to the search engines. Your sitemap should reflect the way visitors would intuitively work through your site. Years ago sitemaps existed only as a boring series of links in líst förm. Today, they are thought of as an extension of your site. You should use your sitemap as a tool to provide your visitor and the search engines with more content. Create details for each section and sub-section through descriptive text placed under the sitemap link. This will help your visitors understand and navigate through your site, and will also give you more food for the search engines. You can even go crazy and add Flash to your sitemap like we did with the interactive Bruce Clay sitemap! Of course, if you do include a Flash sitemap for your visitor, you will also need to include a text map so that the robots can read it.

A good site map will:

Show a quick, easy to follow overview of your site.
Provide a pathway for the search engine robots to follow.
Provide text links to every page of your site.
Quickly show visitors how to get where they need to go.
Give visitors a short description of what they can expect to find on each page.
Utilize important keyword phrases.

Why They Are Important?

Sitemaps are very important for two main reasons. First, your sitemap provides food for the search engine spiders that crawl your site. The sitemap will give the spider links to all the major pages of your site, allowing every page included on your sitemap to be indexed by the spider. This is a very good thing! Having all of your major pages included in the search engine database will make your site more likely to come up in the search engine results when a user performs a query. Your sitemap pushes the search engine toward the individual pages of your site instead of making them hunt around for links. A well planned site map can ensure your Web site is fully indexed by search engines. Sitemaps are also very valuable for you human visitors. They help them to understand your site structure and layout, while giving them quick access to your entire site. It is also helpful for lost users in need of a lifeline. Often if a visitor finds themselves lost or stuck inside your page, he will begin to look for a way out of his hole. Having a detailed sitemap will show him how to get back on track and find what he was looking for. Without it, your visitor would have just closed the browser or headed back over to the search engines. Conversion lost.

Tips for Creating a Sitemap

Your sitemap should be linked from your homepage. Linking it this way will force search engines to find it that way and then follow it all the way through the site. If it's linked from other pages it is likely the spider will find a dead end along the way and just quit. Small sites can place every page on their sitemap, but largër sites should not. You do not want the search engines to see a never-ending líst of links and assume you are a link farm. Most SEO experts believe you should have no more than 25 to 40 links on your sitemap. This will also make it easier to read for your human visitors. Remember, your sitemap is there to assist your visitors, not confuse them. The title of each link should contain a keyword whenever possible and should link to the original page. We recommend writing a short description (10-25) words under each link to help visitors learn what the page is about. Having short descriptions will also contribute to your depth of content with the search engines. Once created, go back and make sure that all of your links are correct. If you have 15 pages on your sitemap, then all 15 pages need to link to every other sitemap page. Otherwise both visitors and search engine spiders will find broken links and löse interest.

Remember to Update!

Just like you can't leave your website to fend for itself, the same applies to your sitemap. When your site changes, make sure your sitemap is updated to reflect that. What good are directions to a place that's been torn down? Keeping your sitemap current will make you an ínstant visitor and search engine favorite.

About The Author
Lisa Barone lbarone@bruceclay.com is a senior writer at Bruce Clay, Inc.

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By Susan Esparza, Bruce Clay, Inc.

With the release of Webmaster Central from beta, Google has made a strong statement that serious Web site owners need to be concerned with, and aware of, a range of data regarding their sites. Crawl errors, backlinks and page load times are all available for a webmaster to study and parse through in order to refine and integrate with their search engine optimization strategy.

Along with Yahoo and MSN, Google provides information at Sitemaps.org regarding how to create an XML file that will feed information to the search engines about a site. Google is committed to assisting webmasters with their sites, even going so far as to enable comments on the official Webmaster Central blog, the only official Google blog that has done so.

Statistics for Unverified Sites

There are two ways to take advantage of the Webmaster tools – site owners can remain unverified and be given a limited look at their site through Google eyes, or verify and receive a more complete look. For sites that are not verified, there are three tools to learn to love: Site information regarding Sitemap details and errors, basic indexing information about your site, and a page for robots.txt analysis and correction where site owners can test their robots.txt file against several user-agents to ensure search engine comprehension.

Upon adding a site to your Google account, you are given a look at the My Sites page, which shows all the sites represented under your Google account. If you only have one site added, you will be immediately taken to the Diagnostic Tab for that site where you can get information about the last crawl date and the site's index status (whether it is included in the index or not). From this page, you can also test your robots.txt file and discover if Googlebot is able to spider your site without encountering problems. Improperly written robots.txt files can block the search engines from indexing relevant content.

From the Sitemaps tab on the My Sites page, you can view information about the Sitemaps you have uploaded to Google and view any errors that the spiders have encountered. Information includes the date that the sitemap was last submitted, as well as the date it was last downloaded by Google. You have the ability to delete any Sitemap and resubmit an updated version of a current Sitemap. Pay attention to the section that lists error codes, some of these could hinder the indexing of your site. Remember the goal of the Sitemaps protocol is to get your site indexed--errors in the document will get in the way of that.

When presented with these powerful tools and data sets, many webmasters are simply overwhelmed and don't know where to begin or how to leverage the information to their advantage. The most asked questíons are about the XML feed. What is it? Do you have to have it? Will your site be indexed without it? As with most things Google, the answer is multipart.

The Sitemaps protocol, which is supported by all three major engines, is merely an XML feed designed to help the engines discover and index all the pages of your Web site. The feed gives information about page creation, updates, and importance. If a page is very important to your site and is not indexed, the feed can help in getting that page spidered. The XML feed will not make your rankings better, except in that it might help the search engine find pages supporting your theme that it didn't previously know about.

The Sitemap isn't a requirement for being indexed, it just makes it easier. Google states:

A Sitemap provides an additional view into your site (just as your home page and HTML site map do). This program does not replace our normal methods of crawling the web. Google still searches and indexes your sites the same way it has done in the past whether or not you use this program. Sites are nevër penalized for using this service.

If your site is already being crawled and included in the index, you probably don't need a Sitemap, but that doesn't mean that you shouldn't still be using the webmaster tools to get a better idea of what Google sees when it crawls your site. Each tool is targeted to a different area.

It should be emphasized that even if you do have a Sitemaps file, it does not replace the need for a physical site map on your Web site. Despite the similarity of names, each serves a distinctly different purpose. Google's Webmaster Guidelines suggest that you include a site map on your page for both users and search engine spiders.

Statistics for Verified Sites

To get the most value out of these tools, your site must be verified. Viewing your site the way Google sees it is often an enlightening experience and will alert you to errors Google has encountered while crawling your site. The problems most commonly found are often also easy to fix, such as 404 errors that redirect to return 200 Okay pages and confuse the search engine. Using the webmaster console can help you identify these problem areas and facilitate the spidering and indexing of your site.

Query information and site analysis is available, giving you a brief snapshot of what Google finds your site relevant for, as well as how (and if) visitors are finding you. The entire console is very user–friendly, even for the most novice of site owners. Using the Webmaster tools can help your search engine optimization campaign by enabling you to make the most out of the vast information Google stores about your site.

One of the reasons that webmasters love the console is that Google shows link data. Digging through the internal links that Google knows about can assist you in strengthening your site's architecture, ensuring that every page can be reached by a spiderable text link. Even more exciting is the external link data the tools provide. Want to know how many links to your site Google actually knows about? The tools allow you to get a much better look at your backlinks, though Google Engineer Matt Cutts warns that you shouldn't assume that every link you see reported counts for your site. Before this feature was included in the console, the only way to get a glimpse at known links was to use Google's link: search operator but that query was notorious for returning just a sampling of links and no one could say how large or small that sample might be. It's now possible to be much more accurate about back links and that kind of knowledge is vital to the success of your SEO project.

If you haven't already incorporated Google's Webmaster Tools into your search engine optimization strategy, now is the time to do so. Google has made it clear that they want webmasters to pay attention to these metrics and there has nevër been a better time for you to get involved. For more information, tips, tricks and developments, chëck out the Official Google Webmaster Central blog .

About The Author
Susan Esparza sesparza@bruceclay.com is a senior writer at Bruce Clay, Inc..

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Labels: Matt Cutts, search engine optimization, SEO, sitemap, webmaster central