Web Strategy: Generating XML Site Map for Search Engine Optimization

Categories: Search Strategy, Web Marketing, Web StrategyPosted on July 7th, 2006

Jeff Leong sent me this link to this resource tool XML Site Maps, that will index your website (or blog) which you can them upload into your public folder on your site.

After you’ve done that, you can tell Google or Yahoo to index this site map, which it will help to crawl your site faster and improve your SEO. Here’s what the site says:

“By placing a formatted xml file with site map on your webserver, you enable Search Engine crawlers (like Google) to find out what pages are present and which have recently changed, and to crawl your site accordingly.”

I’ve talked to Andy Beal about this, and he questions if this tool will actually work, Maybe David Berkowitz has some thoughts –any SEO SEM folks out there that could help give us some answers?

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This entry was posted on Friday, July 7th, 2006 at 6:43 pm and is filed under Search Strategy, Web Marketing, Web Strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Comments

jeremiah_owyang

But doesn't what you described help in the Optimization of Search Results? So isn't that be definition giving the opportunity to improve SEM or SEO?

Philip Nicosia

Just to clarify, the site does exactly what it says. It creates sitemaps that you can feed to search engines.

It doesn't at any point say it will improve your SEO or SERPS.

Google released their Beta sitemap program just over a year ago and a quote from their site tells you their view on its usefulness.
"Google Sitemaps is an easy way to tell Google about all the pages on your site, which pages are most important to you, and when those pages change, for a smarter crawl and fresher search results."

If your site has trouble being crawled by search engines then this could help with that which is what it is designed to do.

I think we would all agree that if your pages are not indexed by search engines you will get zero hits from them so anything you can do to increase the amount of pages you have indexed seems worthwhile.

jeremiah_owyang

Thanks Jeff for all the tips however I'm not sure I understand the purpose of this link you just posted to

http://www.windowsonecare.com/

What's that have to do with SEO? Are you suggesting there is a search term that dominates and links to this site?

Jeff

There is indeed 'a list' of things to do, some easy some which require nice lil hack, IE. http://www.windowsonecare.com/ - which I'm still trying to figure out how they keep ranking in at 1.

At any rate - XML Site Maps just serves as a "free way" to improve you index. Try it out and let us know how it goes.

jeremiah_owyang

Andy

Thanks for the clarfication --I think most would agree with you, there's quite a few other things to optimize first, like pages, content, metatags etc.

Andy Beal

Just to be clear, the tool will likely do what its says, i.e. create a sitemap that can then be fed to Google and Yahoo. But improve your ranking? There are a dozen things that I would do first before paying for a service like this. However, if you're having trouble getting Google and Yahoo to index your most important pages, this could help.