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I have worked across multiple industries from Nursing,to Lecturing, Private Health Consultancy and Management of a College. I have always worked deeply with people and business owners using a variety of skills and experiences. I love people, business and psychology and that is why I have fallen madly in love with and trained as a social media consultant. It ties everything up beautifully. Kay is a DZone MVB and is not an employee of DZone and has posted 17 posts at DZone. You can read more from them at their website. View Full User Profile

What Are Site Maps and Why do you Need Them?

03.06.2013
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 Sitemaps are lists of everything that is on your website.   You  make  them and submit them to search engines like Google to tell them what is on your site.  An  XML Sitemap makes sure that Google knows all of the pages on your site because sometime they can get missed out in the crawling process. 

If you use WordPress, you can use the XMLSitemap plugin which is easy to install and configure and it automatically creates sitemaps for you.  It is all based on the Sitemap protocol  You can submit a text file or RSS/Atom feed as a Sitemap.  If you don’t use WordPress, here is what Google suggests.  How to create a Sitemap.

Sitemaps also help the search engines see the metadata that the crawlers and bots can’t see.  This includes  video, images, mobile, and News. Google suggests that you use a separate Sitemap to submit News information.

2013 01 02 0434 What are Sitemaps and Why do You Need Them?Sitemaps are especially important if:

  • Your site changes a lot
  • Your site has a lot of images and not very much text
  • If your website is new.
  • If you have a lot of blog posts that are not linked to each other

To read more about Sitemaps, go to sitemaps.org.

We will be covering Sitemaps and other aspects of SEO on our WordPress courses in Cumbria  

SEO is all about leaving a trail of breadcrumbs wherever you go and clearly pointing to your website from everywhere on and offline.

Published at DZone with permission of Kay Hebbourn, author and DZone MVB.

(Note: Opinions expressed in this article and its replies are the opinions of their respective authors and not those of DZone, Inc.)

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