Four SEO Tips to Help You Think Like Google - Use Google Sitemaps
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SEO consultant Rob Sullivan (not to be confused with Danny Sullivan) noted that Google’s Sitemap program has some features that make it more worthwhile than you might think at first glance. Maybe you aren’t using it yet because you figure it’s too much trouble or that Google will find and crawl your site anyway. If you are using it, maybe you figure that the main benefit is that you can feed your content to Google rather than waiting for the googlebot to find it on its own.
Using Sitemap can be particularly useful if you have some content that a search engine can’t navigate past, possibly involving flash, AJAX, or JavaScript (remember, these days it isn’t just Google using Google Sitemaps; MSN, Yahoo, and Ask all use the same protocol for Sitemaps now). This is a way to help ensure that it gets indexed.
As Rob Sullivan points out, though, there’s even more going on here. Google has added features to the program. You need to go through Google’s verification process and make sure your 404 errors are configured correctly, but once you do, you can get more information about your site. For example, the “Top Search Queries” feature tells you which keywords were typed into the search engine when your pages appeared in the search results, regardless of whether those pages were clicked on. By seeing what terms your site turned up for, but did not inspire click-throughs, you can consider what adjustments you need to make to appear higher in the SERPs and get more traffic.
Incidentally, the Google Sitemap program will also tell you what terms users put into the search box before clicking on your URL – so you can see which key words were actually successful in driving traffic to your site. You can also check out “Crawl Stats” for a bot's-eye view of how Google sees your site; you’ll even see any errors generated by your web site.
If you want to take advantage of Sitemaps by creating one, there are a few things to keep in mind. First, they’re XML files. Second, there is a limit of 50,000 URLs and 10 MB per sitemap. You can use multiple sitemap files; you’ll need to include a Sitemap index file to serve as an entry point for a total of 1000 sitemaps. Sitemaps can be compressed using gzip, which reduces bandwidth consumption. For more information about the Sitemap protocol, check out the Sitemap website.
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