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Resources for Blogs and Bloggers
Help Search Engines to index your blog using a Sitemap
A Sitemap is essentially an XML file that describes the hierarchy of links to a site. Becomes especially important when a site:
1. is new and has few links
2. has dynamic content
3. have pages with extensive use of Flash and AJAX
4. has an archive of many pages
A Sitemap basically helps search engines to index the pages of a site collecting all the links, with the date of update and some meta data, such as the ‘anchor text. Thus becomes an excellent source of internal links and appears as a link list full of description. Also responds very well to two objectives SEO allowing search engines to find all the pages and index them easily thanks to the description of links.
The use of descriptive links, it facilitates the task to engines that must identify a page and its contents. Specifically, a structure of links divided by categories, such as blogs, helps to give more information on a link and then on a page.
Because of the important contribution that provides on indexing the file sitemap.xml in general should not be hidden among the myriad of folders, but you better have it in the root directory, so it is easily detected by the engine crawlers.
A link to the sitemap should be included on each page of the site. It can easily be accommodated in the header or in the footer. To test the contribution of the sitemap it is enough to make a comparison between the number of pages indexed before Sitemap and few days after the insertion.
To search for pages indexed just type in the search engine the following Site: yourdomain.com
Obviously a greater indexing will bring more visits.
How to generate a sitemap
Generate a Sitemap does not require great coding knowledge or long time as todoay there are many tools around that can create it for free:
* Free Sitemap Generator: A generator on line that includes up to 5000 pages
* GSiteCrawler: free software
For Wordpress blogs things are even easier. We will skip a list and we will go directly to the best one to install just a second after yout WP installation is complete:
Google XML Sitemap (don’t worry, beside the name it works with Bing, Yahoo, etc..)
Now it is time to tell search engines you have a brand new sitemap. We will list the 3 top Search Engines procedures:
Google: Simply create an account (don’t have one already???) and use it to access the Webmasters Tools. Here you can simply add your Sitemap, specifying the exact URL of the XML file.
Yahoo: Same thing to report the sitemap. You need to register and then move to Site Explorer where you can add your site and then report the sitemap.
Bing: Guess what? Register, submit site and sitemap at Webmaster Center.
Each search engine will ask you to validate the sitemap to be sure you are the owner. There are 2 options. The first one is to download a file that you have to upload to your blog root. The second one is to add a <meta> tag containing the authentication code to the <head> section of your default webpage. Your choice!
Don’t forget to check that after the validation process no errors occurred and that finally your sitemap is online!
