Google Sitemaps' place in Search Engine Marketing
Google Sitemaps (Google Webmaster Tools) is a Google-supplied facility to help its spider better index Web sites. It generates a Site Map for an XML feed to Google for site guidance in crawling. It can tell Google when your site's content changes.
Database-driven ecommerce Web sites that are not search engine friendly benefit most, if the system is properly working. Other sites should consider simpler methods to make their sites friendly and accessible to Googlebot, Google's crawler.
Google's Sitemap Generator requires programming expertise for most dynamic Web sites. Expertise with scripts and Python 2.2 or higher is required. Python is an interpreted, interactive, object-oriented, extensible programming language. For non-dynamic sites with fewer than 500 pages, there are free Site Map XML generators available.
Google Sitemaps (Google Webmaster Tools) also provides insightful information about your Web site. Various top search positions, broken links, dates of Googlebot's last crawl, number of pages downloaded on last crawl and most frequent words in the content.
Google Sitemaps and Search Engine Friendly Sites
Search engine-friendly sites with content that does not change daily or at least weekly will be better served by building a traditional HTML Site Map and placing text links to Site Map from all pages. You can optimize Site Map text links for keywords. Text links with keywords will do more to improve search visibility than using Google Sitemaps. That is because the traditional Site Map will do what Google Sitemaps does, plus you can optimize for your keywords. The XML feed to Google Sitemaps is not optimized. What the XML feed does do along with Google Sitemaps, is provide you with the detailed statistics. So having both a static HTML Site Map and a XML feed will provide the best of both worlds.
If you find that your site does not appear well on Google, then these steps will have more impact on your search visibility than simply implementing Google Sitemaps.
Link pages together on your site via static href links. Do not have a site made in frames or with Flash. Google Sitemaps will not solve the problems that Googlebot has with these sites. Use keyword-filled content and text links. Develop in-bound links from relevant, quality Web directories and sites. The most common problem of sites lacking Google visibility is that they do not have in-bound links. With in-bound links, you will find that Googlebot will crawl pages on your site many times each day. You will find that your entire site, assuming it is search engine friendly, is crawled by Googlebot every week. Do your linking campaigns carefully as Google will penalize sites linked from sites that Google considers "bad neighborhoods." To know whether Google considers a site to be a quality site, check that the site has a Google PageRank of at least 3.
You can find details about Google Sitemaps at:
Contact E-Power Marketing for further information.
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