SiteMaps And Why They Are Important For SEO

You may or may not have heard the term ‘Sitemap’ and wondered what it is and why it is important. Maybe its not important? In fact a sitemap is very important and should be at or near the top of your list for onpage seo.

So What is a Sitemap and why is it such a big deal?

A Sitemap sits at the very heart of Search Engine Friendly Website Design. They in effect, make it very quick and easy for all of the search engines to find and index all of your website pages by putting links to each page in one area. A sitemap is a graphical representation of the architecture of your website.

Site maps also allow you to help the search engines to clearly understand what your web site is about and presents some unique opportunities in optimisation. “Keyword density” is a term often used to describe the number of times a particular search phrase appears within your site. Site maps should make maximum use of your most relevant and important keywords. It should contribute to your keyword density within the link text on the page itself.

All links should be plain text and point to every page within your site with descriptive words that make it easy for both visitors and search engine spiders to understand what they will find on every page linked to from your sitemap page.

You should have two sitemap files in your root directory. An xml file for search engines and a html page for humans to see.

You can submit your Sitemap .xml to the search engines by using the links below, just add your sitemap location i.e http://www.sksservices.co.uk/sitemap.xml to the end of each link:-

Google
http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ping?sitemap=

Yahoo
http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/updateNotification?appid=SitemapWriter&url=
http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/ping?sitemap=

Ask
http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=

Live Search
http://webmaster.live.com/ping.aspx?siteMap=

Bing
http://www.bing.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?siteMap=

Sitemaps are essential as an optimisation technique and should always be linked to from your index page or home page. Creating Sitemaps is part of our seo service.

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