The Missing Link

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A sitemap can be a powerful tool in optimizing your site.  Learn all the tricks of the trade here with Dr. A. J. Williams' report.  You want your site to be a flashing light to Google and Yahoo.  Having lots of images and levels in your site might make for an interesting site, but if your site cannot be easily spidered, your site may be invisible to search engines.  Find out how to maximize your sitemap or use the tools suggested here to have a sitemap created for you!

A sitemap is a webpage (or multiple pages) that lists all of the pages on your website – or at least the pages that you want the search engines to find and include in their index. Without a doubt, it is one of the most underrated weapons in your search engine optimization toolbox.

Before we explore the value and use of sitemaps, let us just consider how new web pages get into the search engines. We will place emphasis on Google, being the most important search engine for free traffic. There are two main ways:

1. Submitting New Pages to the Search Engines.

This means that you visit a page that the search engines have provided, and fill in information about your new page. When you click the submit button, that information is stored in a database, and eventually the search engine will send out a spider to examine the pages. It is probably the case that pages that are submitted in this way will not rank as well as pages that the search engines find for themselves.

Google has its “Add URL” page at: http://www.google.com/addurl.html

Altavista has theirs at: http://addurl.altavista.com/addurl/new

Some search engines do not have a submit page, or at least charge money for submitting pages. An example is Inktomi, which does not actually have a search engine itself. Inktomi does have a huge database of web sites that it has collected. It then rents or sells the website database to other search engines. At the time of writing this document, MSN uses Inktomi search results in its engine. I doubt that this will last for too much longer as MSN is now sending out its own spiders around the web. Are they going to provide their own results? Probably.

2. Letting the Search Engines Find the Pages Themselves (Preferred Method).

Search engine spiders are software programs that scour the Internet looking for new and changed web pages. These search engine spiders will follow links on every web page they encounter in their unending quest for more data. When a new page is found (or changes are detected in known web pages), these busy creatures take notes and eventually return to the mother ship. These spiders will then unload their new data into the search engine database. Eventually these pages should end up in the search engine index, and be found in the search engine results pages.

Suppose you create a new web page at: http://mydomain.com/findme.html

How is Google going to find that page? The answer is by one of the methods above. Either you submit it, or you let Google find it by itself. I do not recommend submitting any pages manually. Let Google find them itself. Now from what we discussed above, you know that for Google to find the page, there must be another page that links to it.

Next: Finding Your Homepage >>
 

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