In great news, Google, Yahoo and MSN have agreed upon a What's this mean to you? Well, you just need to create one XML sitemap and you can submit it to all three engines. I've been doing that for a while and didn't seem to have any problem but now it's official. Why should you create an XML sitemap? An XML sitemap outlines all the URLs on a site so that search engines can find them all easily. Much like a normal sitemap, it just lists all the pages however, an XML sitemap is optimized for search engines, not for people. By giving search engines a list of URLs on your site, you are increasing the number of pages they know about and can refer traffic to. If you posted once a day for a year, you'd have 365 post pages. That doesn't include categories, archives and any other blog related pages. Since the numbers add up so quickly, it's hard for a search engine to keep up and even harder for a user to keep them organized so that an engine can find them all easily. An XML sitemap gives engines one file full of all the URLs on your site, optimized just for them. So, how do you create an XML site map? There are variety of ways but here are my top three choices:
2. GSite Crawler. This is a free desktop application for PCs that will crawl your site and create the XML site map for you to upload. It doesn't automatically update but it is easy to use and you could re-generate an XML map ever month or so. If anyone knows of a free Mac app like this, I'd love to hear about it. Comments Bookmark Murdok: Thomas McMahon is a SEO Designer forSuggest a Correction
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