Certainly we talked about many techniques for Search Engine Optimization, how to prepare the website, the content … etc. Now I want to talk about tools that make life more easy for developers working on Search Engine Optimization, and more precise the google service Google Sitemaps.
Search engines such as Google discover information about your site by employing software known as “spiders” to crawl the web. Once the spiders find a site, they follow links within the site to gather information about all the pages. The spiders periodically revisit sites to find new or changed content.
Google Sitemaps is an experiment in web crawling. By using Sitemaps to inform and direct our crawlers, we hope to expand our coverage of the web and speed up the discovery and addition of pages to our index.
Why Sitemaps is useful for SEO ?
The idea behind sitemaps is create a communication tunnel between your existant pages in website and the search engine. The informations transferred via XML format inform google spider about your pages so it is more easy to find you, and index your new content rather than indexing all your website to look for updated data.
How to implement Google Sitemaps in your site ?
Google described the the Sitemap Protocol and offered many formats for syndications. The supported formats are :
- Sitemap protocol
- OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting)
- Syndication feed
- Text file
In addition to this, many open source software offer plugins and module to implement Sitemaps such WordPress, LifeType, Mambo … etc. These plugins will take care of everything from the creating of the sitemap until to notify google about the update.
Conclusion
Using Google Sitemaps, google will certainly know better your website and crawl more pages on your site and you will be able to tell Google when content on your site changes. A free service with a great value which worth really to get interest while working on SEO of a website.
