Everything About Sitemaps – Sitemaps Guide

This post is all about sitemaps. In this post you will come to know why you should use or create sitemaps of your blog, why submit them to Google and how they benefit. I will try clearing your doubts in this post.

What Are Sitemaps?

The Sitemaps allows a webmaster to inform search engines about URLs on a website that are available for crawling. A Sitemap is an XML file that lists the URLs for a site. It allows webmasters to include additional information about each URL: when it was last updated, how often it changes, and how important it is in relation to other URLs in the site. This allows search engines to crawl the site more intelligently. Sitemaps are a URL inclusion protocol and complement robots.txt, a URL exclusion protocol.

[Source: Wikipedia.Com]

In short Sitemap is a file which tells the search engines and indexers that my web site has been updated. The following things are new in it and you kindly please update my site on your search engine and also add the new content.

Why Are Sitemaps Beneficial?

Search engines use automatic crawlers, why use sitemaps? Answer to this question should lie within you. If search engines crawl automatically, they take a long time to do so. They may take few days to few weeks depending on the search engine. But if you use sitemaps, the page gets indexed within a minute, that’s many times faster than automatic crawling done by the search engines.

Sitemaps tell the search engines that to include the Flash, Ajax, Etc. content in the web page or web pages made of them. Normally search engines do not crawl such Flash and Ajax pages and don’t index them automatically. But Sitemaps force them to do so. This can help build your ranking in search engines.

What Sitemaps Contain?

Sitemaps contain all the links to all your pages in your website or blog. They also have the information about their post date, the date when they were last updated and all such related details. Some sitemaps also have the feature to add priorities to different pages,etc. This instructs the search engines to take this page more seriously than others.

Which Search Engines Support Sitemaps?

Almost all the search engines support sitemaps. To be in competition they need to support sitemaps. Some of the popular search engines supporting sitemaps are Google, MSN, Yahoo, and Ask. There are many others who support sitemaps too. But I knew these few so I mentioned them here.

My Experience With Sitemaps.

Earlier I considered it waste of time creating and submitting sitemaps. I was completely wrong. It wasn’t like how I was thinking about it. Then after reading at many places and from many experts I submitted my first sitemap at Google. Initially in the few hours it didn’t help me. After all everything takes some time. Then the sitemap got submitted. I thought, it’s good that it was submitted without any errors. It also showed the message saying “Such number of URL’s have been submitted” where such number standing for the number of URL’s. I got what submitted? Where submitted? Then I tried searching for some of my posts in Google and to my surprise all the posts of my blog I searched for were included in Google. Wasn’t it good? It was!

Essential Reading:

- Create WordPress Sitemap