Sitemap

Everyone of you must be wondering what on earth a "sitemap" is for when you visited any website that was designed by a respective web designer. A sitemap is actually NOT for human to view but more for a web crawlers to go through in order for "them" to recognize and establish your site. It may sound a little bit too technical but you can actually do this. Here I would like to quote a little bit of what Scott Raven said in his Easy Traffic Now: Your Definitive Guide to Traffic Generation;

"Site maps are basically a file that shows the entire structure, including linking, of your entire website. Google has a service where you can submit your site map directly to them in much the same way you submit your site to the search engines. It does require you to have a site map in XML format, but you can find site map generators all over the net. To submit a site map to Google, simply create an account with Google Site Maps and submit the link to your site map. Google will give you a file name that you must upload to your site in the root folder. All you do is open up Notepad and click “save as.” Copy the file name exactly as Google gives it to you and then change the “file type” to html. Once you save this file, upload it to your site and tell Google that it is completed. Google will verify the file and your site map is submitted. That’s it. Very easy."

Maybe easier said than done for most people who are still a bit blur as to what I'm talking. Anyway, I've received an e-mail this morning from Jayde saying that as of April 11th, you no longer has to manually submit your sitemap to search engines.

"Last fall, the major search engines agreed on a sitemaps format. You can now add a simple line to your robots.txt file and let the engines know where your sitemap document resides on your site. Just include the following line in your robots.txt file and you should be all set:

Sitemap: http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml

Robots.txt has traditionally been used in a more prohibitive fashion - by telling search engine spiders where not to go on your site. This latest sitemaps implementation of robots.txt however is telling the spiders where TO go."

~ Chris Richardson of Jayde ~

So update your sitemap today and make it more search engine friendly!