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December 1, 2006
Web Marketing Newsletter
Search Engine Sitemaps
How to build a site map and why you
need MORE than one
Greetings,
My question today is, how's your sitemap?
Every website should have a sitemap, which is a page
in your website (or if you have lots of pages in
your web your sitemap could be more than 1 page)
with a hyperlink to every page in your web. And,
every page in your web should have a link to the
sitemap. I recommend a static site map, even if you
have a dynamic web. You can look at my humble
sitemap as an example
www.roncastle.com/sitemap.htm
The purpose of a sitemap is to make it easy
for search engine spiders and robots to find all of
the content in your website so that you can get your
content in the search engine index. Even relatively
unimportant pages of content ARE important because
page count makes a difference, especially with
Google. When you get over 100 pages in the Google
index, some really good things start to happen to
your ability to gain organic rankings.
There is a new kind of sitemap that
is VERY important to your website, a sitemap in XML,
which is a very specific form of formatted text
similar to html. Early this year, Google started
what they call Google Sitemaps BETA, which is a free
online service within your free Google account (you
can open one if you don't have). The idea Google had
was to get you to create and upload an XML sitemap
of your website and then register it with them. You
tell Google the file name, they go check the format
and approve it. In exchange for your time and labor
Google will then show you some of the things they
know and see when they crawl and index your website,
things like 404 file not found errors, for example.
This past month
www.Yahoo.com and MSN
www.Live.com have come together in conjunction
with Google and
www.sitemaps.org
to agree on and approve a standard protocol for XML
sitemaps. This is big news from a search engine
optimization perspective and is important to every
web owner if you are competing in organic search.
An XML sitemap in your web makes it at least 10
times as easy for search engine spiders and robots
to find new or updated content. Rather than crawling
every page in your web, all they have to do is crawl
the XML file and then go look at the changes or
additions. This saves big time on hardware costs
(magabucks) for the engines and also makes it faster
to keep search results current. In an online world
with billions of web pages, this makes a huge
difference.
You need an XML sitemap in your web if you
want to be a top notch competitor.
How do you make an XML sitemap? There are a number
of online sitemap generators, which may work OK for
small websites with less than 100 pages of static
content. I have tried a number of them. NONE of them
have been 100% reliable - they generate sitemaps
that meet the protocol but don't necessarily find
all the pages in your website. This defeats the
purpose.
After 6 months of searching around and testing, I
have found the best program available thus far to
crawl or spider your website and generate a
compliant XML file for Google, Yahoo and Live.com.
Last week I used the program to create a sitemap for
a dynamic ecommerce website with over 5,900 pages.
If you are interested in creating an XML sitemap for
your website, and you absolutely should be, I would
be pleased to do this for you or for your webmaster,
but it's not a freebie. For a small website, the
cost will be $40-$50. For a large dynamic web, it
might cost $100-$200 or more depending on the time
it takes to crawl the web. If you do not have a
static html or asp sitemap, I will also generate a
list of URL's that you can paste into a static page
in your web to make a static sitemap. I recommend
that you have both.
As part of the deal, I will make you or your
webmaster totally independent from me so that you
can get the program that I use (for free) and use it
to keep your XML sitemap up to date. I will double
check your work and give you full instructions on
how to get your sitemap approved and validated by
Google.
Every time I make a change in my website,
I create a new XML sitemap, upload it to my website
and tell Google it has changed. I have regenerated
by sitemap 4 times in the past week. I also do this
for all of my web and SEO clients. As a result, I
have seen a reduction in time of 2-3 days in getting
new content crawled and indexed with Google, from
7-10 days to 5-8 days. If you are doing ecommerce
and adding or changing last minute items for holiday
shoppers, this is a big deal? I think so.
If you are interested in my offer send me an email
with your URL(s) for your website(s) and if you
like, I will take a quick look and give you a
estimate on cost. You can pay me via PayPal.
If you are a current
web or SEO client, you already have an XML sitemap
in your web. Now you know why?
Cheers,
Ron Castle
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