Posted under Search Engine Optimisation
What is a Google Sitemap?
A Google Sitemap is a small XML file that sits on your server alongside your webpages. It allows Google to see how your site is structured, how importantly you rate indvidual pages and how often those pages are updated.
Why do you need one?
Google Sitemaps was released in 2005, and up until then getting the optimisation right for Google was just a guessing game, with the algorithms that they use to rank a site kept secret and no communication from Google to Webmasters (neither of which have changed!). Once a site was submitted, all there was left to do was to wait and hope. Once submitted a site might not resurface at all or certain pages might rank higher than others with no way of contacting Google and controlling the process or letting them know when a page had been updated.
With Sitemaps, Google have now given Webmasters a chance of supplying them with valuable information about their websites and also given Webmasters the ability to see what Google thinks about each website and what can be done to improve its standing.
Lets eleaborate on that. Within the Sitemap XML code there is the ability to ‘rate’ pages on how popular you think they should be from 0.1 to 1.0. So if you think your home page is the most important page, you could rate it 1.0, with your product pages at 0.8 and your contact page at 0.2 for instance.
In return Google lets you know what the Googlebot (an automated program that lists pages in sites) has found, whether its a page or a troublesome broken link. Furthermore, a Google Sitemap account will let you know what words Google associates with your website, judging by what the Googlebot has seen on your site (useful for accurate optimisation) and a list of words that Googlebot has found linking to your site from elsewhere on the web.
How do you get one?
If you want to enhance your website with a Sitemap or make it part of an overall optimisation package and improve the way Google indexes your webpages, just contact Webgear Design Solutions and we will do the rest.