Ez Internet Money

XML Sitemaps are very important for every website, and even more so for a new website! XML Sitemaps provide a broad picture road map for search engines. Generally speaking, search engines spider three to four pages deep with no problem. After that, it is a crap shoot if those deep linked pages get indexed. If you leave it up to the search engines, you will get unpredictable results.

Do you really want your sitemap.html page being indexed? It provides very little information about your message or product. Yes, enables your visitors to be able to find every page in your site. But do you really want your new visitors to land on that page? Chances are not. But spiders love sitemap.html type pages because the contain great information on which pages are in your site.

XML site maps are great for big sites. If your site has over 100 pages of content which may lie three to four pages deep from your home page or landing page, then a XML sitemap is a must for you. By telling the search engine what pages are there, you stand a greater chance of the spider finding your important pages and indexing them. Let face it, every page that is indexed is a potential sale or lead. If only 25 of your 100 page site is indexed, you could be missing 75 per 100 searches for your keyword.

But by far, XML site maps are the most important for new sites. Older sites that are very informative tend to get linked to. If your site is linked to, then search engines can find your site. New sites don’t have the luxury of having a lot of different links pointing to their site. By creating a sitemap and telling the search engines that is there, your website will be spidered and indexed much sooner than if you didn’t. In my experience, the sites that I have submitted to Google via sitemap have had four pages or more crawled and indexed within two weeks of being live.

The best resource for the amateur or layman site creator is XML Sitemaps. The free service provided will search your site via links, and provide you with a properly formatted XML Sitemap. Once you upload it you the same directory as your index page, you need to register it with each search engine. To do that, you will have to create an account with each search engine. I have provided the links for Google, MSN Live and Yahoo.

Google
Yahoo
MSN Live

Ask is a little different To submit a sitemap to Ask, you have to type in this address:
Ask

Each and every time you make a change on your site, you should be creating or editing a XML Sitemap. Search Engines, Google in particular, like a site whose content is updated often. This is because search engines want to provide the best match for each keyword. So the more often you upate your site, the more you are rewarded.

To see an example of my sitemaps, take a look at these two site maps:

www.ez-internet-money.com sitemap

www.ez-internet-money.com blog sitemap

If you have any qustions, feel free to ask it in a comment or shoot me an email. I will do my best to provide you with an informative answer. If I don’t know, I will refer you to a more informative resource.