Quick and easy sitemaps
Sitemaps help users find the right page if they get lost, but can also have significant search marketing benefits. The technical definition care of sitemaps.org is:
Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling…so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.
So knowing that having a sitemap can create massive search marketing benefits, I obviously don’t need to tell you that you need one as you’ve already got one! No? Well I’ll let you in on a secret – they are very easy to create with the right tools.
A personal favourite of mine is WriteMaps. This allows you to visually build up your sitemap in a tree-like structure, entering page details as you go and then export it in the right format. Once you’ve done this simply upload it to your web server and you’re away. The best bit about Writemaps is it’s free!
Another free tool is XML Sitemaps, which does the same thing but in a slightly different way. You enter your domain name and the website crawls your website much like a search engine bot would and returns the results in a nicely formatted sitemap in a range of file formats. Again, simply download it and install on your web server.
In an upcoming post I’ll outline how to get Google to recognise you’re sitemap via their Webmaster Tools.
