Step Wise SEO

The Google Sitemap is a specially formatted “map” made just for Google’s search engine spider to use as its very own key to navigating your site.

Google Sitemaps is especially helpful if Google has a hard time indexing your site; for example, if your site has a very large number of pages or dynamically generated pages. Here are the basics:

• You’ll first need to create a specially formatted file-a Sitemap-using Google’s Sitemap generator tool.

Google’s help page at www.google.com/webmasters/ sitemaps/docs/en/faq.html has the scoop on how to generate a Sitemap and where you need to put it on your site.

However you create it, the resulting Sitemap document contains the list of URLs that you want Google to crawl and, if you wish, additional data such as how often the page is updated and how important each page is to you.

• To get Google to notice the Sitemap, you must sign up for a Google Sitemaps account and perform a few steps so that Google can identify and validate your file. With all this squared away, you’re in business.

• Using your Google Sitemaps account, you can review basic data about your URLs, including whether they were indexed, which (if any) errors they returned, and what search terms your visitors used to find them.

You can even view PageRank summaries of your site’s pages and get your hands on some other cool tools: page analysis, robots.txt info, and more.

This data is not the same as Google Analytics (which is much more detailed and customizable), but it’s great for finding red flags.

Google Sitemaps, essentially, allows two-way communication between you and Google, which is a relatively new and wonderful thing.

Using Google Sitemaps won’t help you rank higher or increase your PageRank, and it doesn’t guarantee that your pages will be indexed. But it can certainly give your deep or dynamic pages a fighting chance!

You can sign up for your Google Sitemaps account here: www.google.com/ web masters/site maps/site overview.