Many customers always ask the questions “What is a site map?” and “Why do I need a site map?” These are both great questions and it’s important that anyone with a website understands the importance of sitemaps.
Let’s start with the question of “what is a sitemap?” Well to put it simply, a sitemap is a map for search engines like Google and Yahoo to help navigate through your site. Typically a sitemap lists all the pages that are hosted on your store; this includes pages that are not linked from other pages on your site. Now having non linked pages in your sitemap can be both a good thing and a bad thing, depending on whether you want that page to be visible for people to see. So be sure you review your sitemap before submitting them to the search engines.
Now this leads to the question of why you need a sitemap. For anyone who has done any type of search engine marketing in the past, they have likely read that submitting your homepage to a search engine is as far as you need to take it. Well this isn’t true! Search engine crawlers often get lost and don’t always find every page on a website. This is especially true if you have a site with hundreds of pages, such as an online store. So why risk not getting all your pages indexed by Google and potentially losing out on sales, submitting a site map guarantees that this doesn’t happen.
The other reason you want a sitemap is to get your site pages indexed faster. Google and all the major search engines have free tools available, which allow you to easily upload your sitemaps. By using these tools to upload your sitemap, you will typically find your site indexed within hours of your submission. (Google’s is called Webmaster Tools) If you decide not to use the webmaster tools provided by the search engines, expect to wait weeks and in certain cases months for all your pages to get indexed properly.
If you’re a Shopster customer and looking to create your first site map, we’ve made this process as simple as possible. Once your store is built and ready to be marketed, go to the “Marketing” tab and click on the “Sitemap” link. There are some easy directions listed to guide you through creating and submitting a sitemap. But if you’re just looking to create your sitemap, it’s a matter of simply clicking on the “Create Sitemap” button and downloading your file.
Remember that the key to any successful online business is to get your store in front of as many qualified customers as possible. Be sure to take advantage of the free traffic from search engines by developing a thorough strategy and updating your sitemap regularly.
Happy Selling.
HTML sitemaps can also be good for pushing relevant anchor text to ones own website. This works best if you make sure your site amp page has some juice to give. I prefer A1 Sitemap Generator because it can create XML + multi column/page sitemaps.
Posted by: Bangalore Forex | December 14, 2009 at 09:44 AM