Looking for the best ways to get your site indexed and ranked at the top of the search engines? One tactic you can employ to accomplish this is to include a sitemap on your site, or a page that has links to every other page on your site.
Technically speaking, a sitemap according to Search Engine News is “a specific page on a website that provides search engines an alternative access to contents and information, and also helps webmasters and visitors to make sense of the information contained in the website.”
Google is now throwing more support to sitemaps and Bing has apparently followed suit…unlike the past however, you do have to manually submit the sitemap to the search engines.
Without submitting a sitemap, the only way Google can crawl and index your site is through other websites linking to yours. It’s quite possible for pages to get missed this way…but it does point out weaknesses in a particular page, like not carrying enough link juice or having unique content. Data you get from a natural search engine crawl is still valuable in other words.
You can easily create a sitemap to submit to Google through their free Sitemap Generator tool. But it may be wise to allow Google to do a natural crawl of your site first to get a better picture of which pages need more work.
Including a sitemap on your site though is also very helpful to visitors – one location where they can easily find any page on your website.
Tags: link building, organic search, search engine optimization
