Adding a Sitemap - More Than Just Usability

Does your website have a sitemap? A sitemap is a page on your site that lists all the other pages on the site, usually in a tree structure so that a user can easily navigate to any part of the site without rooting around through navigation (here is our sitemap). Aside from the usability service that a sitemap offers your site's human visitors, it also makes a nice place for search engine spiders to go and quickly understand the layout of a website and index all its pages in a fast and effective manner. It wasn't long before Google realized this and embraced an XML format version of the classic sitemap as a tool for webmasters to help the Googlebot crawl their site in an orderly fashion. They launched Google Sitemaps (here is our XML sitemap).

I've been using it for some time now for a few client sites and it is a marvelous tool for understanding the Googlebot's activity on a given site, and also for helping the Googlebot find the important content on a site. However it was only useful with Google. The use of the XML sitemap protocol had little to no understandable effect on rankings in the other two major search engines - Yahoo! and MSN. However, last week Yahoo! and MSN announced that they too will be adopting the Sitemap protocol and will offer a tool set to manage their search engines interaction with XML sitemaps. Yahoo!'s sitemap functionality is part of its already excellent Site Explorer tools, and MSN's functionality is yet to be launched.

If you already have an XML sitemap, you just doubled (or tripled) the bang for the bucks (or the time) you put into it. Submit it to Yahoo! and enjoy. If you don't have an XML sitemap, here are links to an array of tools (mostly free) that you can use to get one implemented.

• Official announcements from Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo!
• Learn about the sitemaps protocol here: Sitemaps.org
• Create XML sitemaps for your site with these tools: sitemapspal.com, XML-Sitemaps.com or for your Wordpress site with this plug-in
• Submit your sitemaps on Google and Yahoo! (Microsoft is still testing their tool internally)

Need help getting your site ready to capitalize on the benefits of XML sitemaps? We're always happy to help...