subject: Make Your Site Google Friendly With A Site Map [print this page] Gone are the days when becoming listed in Google was a matter of employing the proper keyword meta tags. Today its a bit more complicated and I want to share an simple recommendation to make Google like your blog a bit more and its referred to as the site map.
Why do you need a site map?
Today you will find a couple of website map variants, Google XML sitemaps and HTML sitemap. Both are simple to create today with the availability of free resources all over the internet. Blogs are very popular at this time. So, it is no surprise that finding a WordPress plug-in that satisfies this requirement is easy to find.
Having a sitemap is a fantastic idea to help visitors hit more of your pages. I remember looking at my traffic stats before I had the site map installed on my blog and noticed that I had fewer page views. Since I added the sitemap, the page views have increased by 50%. Simply by placing the XML sitemap file on your server, it enables Googles robots (a.k.a. "bots") to crawl your web blog a lot easier and thereby communicating to the Google search engine that your site is user friendly and easy to navigate. Let me share with you where Google is coming from for a better understanding.
Your neighborhood shopping mall has a site map. So, why doesnt your web site?
Think of how a "brick and mortar" grocery store or shopping mallwould structure their store if theywanted to sell you the products that they carry. They want to make your experience pleasant so that you spend more time there and buy more items. If products are too challenging to find shoppers simply get frustrated and leave. This is the identical premise that Google follows by putting the sitemap suggestion in their guide. Note that just because Google is one of the most popular sites (I think Facebook just moved into #1), doesnt mean that you are adding a sitemap just for Google. I would like to point out that the other search engines use it too. So keep in mind that Yahoo!, Ask and Bing are following the search engine giant by enjoying the XML sitemap file on your server as well.
The "bots" love your sitemap.
Keep in mind that the search engine bots are not as interested in crawling and gobbling up the posts that you write as they are the pages that you have on your site or blog. So, it makes senseto keep the pages easily accessible for the search engines. Doing sowill in turn give your posts much better prominence on the search engines.People searching for the keywordsthat you are trying to rank your pages and posts for will be able to find your information much easier. So, in this way your pages (and posts) will be ranked provided that you are implementing some on-pageSEO techniques.
Now that you know the benefits of installing a sitemap on your siteand how simple it is to do, I hope you take advantage of this little suggestion soon to help improve your visitors' experience as well as for the search engines' robots.
