Search Engine Ranking: Use XML Sitemap for Better Google Indexing

Today I will talk a little more about search engine ranking. Before any search engine ranks your web site or blog pages, they need to know what your website has to offer them. And your website and/or blog sitemap will inform search engines about all the pages that are available for crawling, which brings out my today’s blog post topic “Sitemap for Your Blog” and I will break down this post by the following format:

• Definition of Sitemap
• Types of Sitemap
• Importance of Sitemaps
• Creating a sitemap for my blog

What is a Website Sitemap?
By definition, a sitemap is an XML file that lists all the URLS for any site along with some additional metadata ( how often the list changes, last times you website was updated etc) about each of those URLs, so that search engines bots are rank your webs pages accordingly.

What is the mportance of Sitemap?
Web crawlers (search software created by search engines) usually discover pages from links within your website and from other websites. Sitemaps supplement all those links to allow web crawlers (that support Sitemaps) to pick up all URLs in the Sitemap and learn about those URLs metadata. Using the Sitemap protocol does not guarantee that web pages are included in search engines, but provides hints for web crawlers to do a better job of crawling your site. Let’s take a look what Google says about Sitemaps. Sitemaps are particularly helpful if:

• Your site has dynamic content.
• Your site has pages that aren’t easily discovered by Googlebot during the crawl process – for example, pages featuring rich AJAX or Flash.
• Your site is new and has few links to it. (Googlebot crawls the web by following links from one page to another, so if your site isn’t well linked, it may be hard for us to discover it.)
• Your site has a large archive of content pages that are not well linked to each other, or are not linked at all.

You can also use a Sitemap to provide Google with additional information about your pages, including:

• How often the pages on your site change. For example, you might update your product page daily, but update your About Me page only once every few months.
• The date each page was last modified.
• The relative importance of pages on your site. For example, your home page might have a relative importance of 1.0, category pages have an importance of 0.8, and individual blog entries or product pages have an importance of 0.5. This priority only indicates the importance of a particular URL relative to other URLs on your site, and doesn’t impact the ranking of your pages in search results.
• Sitemaps provide additional information about your site to Google, complementing our normal methods of crawling the web. We expect they will help us crawl more of your site and in a more timely fashion, but we can’t guarantee that URLs from your Sitemap will be added to the Google index. Sites are never penalized for submitting Sitemaps.

What types of Sitemaps are Available for my Website and/or Blog?
There are two types of sitemap that you can use for you blog. They are

• HTML Sitemaps, which is a page that lists all the all the available web pages of your website and/or blog broken down by sections to help users find the information they need.
• XML Sitemaps, which is also called Sitemaps, with a capital ‘S’. This is another way and customized way to inform Google about your website’s and/or blogs available pages to crawl. And this is also the type of Sitemap that we’ll be discussing in this article.

How to Choos the right Sitemap format for my Blog?
My theory is that “to be the best, you got the hang out with the best, abiding by their rules”. Google already proved to be the best search engine on the web by gaining the highest online search market share. Keeping that in mind, we will design our sitemap for Google. And XML Sitemap is what Google is asking for.

How can I create a sitemap for my blog?
By now we know, what sitemap, importance of sitemap and what type of sitemap to use for your blog. So, its action time. You have three options at this moment.

• If you have an xml Google sitemap then it’s great and thanks for reading this post.
• If you have a sitemap for your blog which is not in XML format then you need to add an XML formatted sitemap for Google.
• If you don’t have any then you also need to add XML formatted sitemap for you blog

You can create a XML sitemap for your website in ext 5 minutes following the steps below:

• Step 1:
  Go to wordpress.com/extend/plugins and download the Google XML Sitemaps Wordpress plugin. Why this particular one , because it has the least compatibility issues with other plugins and to back is up , Google XML Sitemaps has the highest downloading number, almost 1M times.
• Step 2:
  Upload this Zip-Archived file into your wp-content/plugins/ directory and extract all files. Then go into your Wordpress administration page, click on Plugins and activate it. After that you will have a new menu point called “Sitemap” under the “Options” menu. You can alter the default change frequencies, filename and other options there. Click once on “Rebuild Sitemap” to create your sitemap the first time.

Wow, finally you have done it and you have made your blog ready to rock and for that you got googlebot to dance with you using XML sitemaps for your blog. By the way, just in case you wanted to know how I knew all of the above then the answer will be I am nerd enough to spend some time reading Goggle webmaster tool, Sitemap.org and Wp Plugins page. Also, since you have read my post you a nerd as well but in a smaller scale. Enjoy your rest of the day.

Filed Under: Blogging • Search Engine Optimization • WordPress

Tags: best sitemap plugin wp • Better Google Indexing • google indexing sitemap • google XML Sitemap • how to create sitemap • Search Engine Ranking • wordpress XML Sitemap • wp lugin siteme map generator • wp sitemap help • XML Sitemap google