Chris Pearson, the qualified mechanical engineer turned perfectionist website designer has written a couple of great posts over on his increasingly popular blog, on the subject of SEO.
In the first two articles of his five part series he discusses the importance of sitemaps. To sum up his articles in one sentence:
Sitemaps are vitally important in getting properly indexed by the big search engines.
Both of the articles come with wordpress plugins to generate yummy sitemaps for Google at the click of a button. Another reason to move to wordpress!
After asking Chris why we need both sitemap generators, 1 x xml sitemap and 1 x xhtml sitemap, he replied:
‘The XML sitemap is a tool that is specifically designed to help Google (and other search engines) refine how often it should crawl your site.
Here’s what Google says about XML sitemaps:
By submitting a Sitemap file, you can take control of the first part of the crawling/indexing processes: our discovery of the pages.
This may be particularly helpful if your site has dynamic content, pages that aren’t easily discovered by following links, or if your site is new and has few links to it.
The XHTML sitemap, on the other hand, serves two purposes:
- It ensures that all the pages of your site are interlinked (which Google says is helpful for crawling).
- 2. It can serve as a useful tool for users, especially if they can’t find what they’re looking for through any other avenue of discovery.“
So hurry along to <a href="http://www.pearsonified.com/" title="Pearsonified" target="_blank"his blog, read the articles, install the plugins, and see what extra Google traffic comes your way.
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