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Creating Sitemaps For Google, MSN and Yahoo! - The Easy Way
By Philip Nicosia
If you own or maintain a website or intend to own one, wouldn’t it be great if you get frequent visitors who find satisfaction in getting exactly the information they need from your page?
While that satisfaction largely depends on the contents of your website, how you get to be accessed by website users is the
most critical factor of website development. For if your website can’t be reached universally, you defeat the very purpose of the internet: that is, to make information available to any website user from across the world.
How you get to be accessed is actually a matter of presentation style, organization, and most importantly, how fast and extensive search engines get to lead users to your website. Unless your pages are indexed in the search engines they can’t send you the free visitors you are all looking for.
Fortunately, the search engines want your content too and there are a number of ways you can help them, which they encourage you to do - by creating sitemaps of your website. Sitemaps created for the various search engines will enable these search engines’ spiders to crawl faster, more systematically, and more extensively into your website’s pages.
By doing so, you get the maximum exposure you can. Such exposure will boost your pride in having your pages viewed, read, and used by more and more visitors the way you intended them to. On the financial aspect, the more visitors your website gets, the higher your website’s potential advertising value.
Now with the vast expansion of websites on the internet, it has become necessary to create different types of sitemaps, each
having its own complexity in setting up.
HTML Sitemaps
Creating an HTML sitemap linked to and from your home page is something savvy webmasters have been doing for years and
perhaps is the simplest to create. This sitemap is simply a list of pages contained on your site and enables the search engines spiders to easily find your pages, especially the ones that are linked deep in your website that they may have trouble finding otherwise.
TEXT Sitemaps
A text sitemap is simply a list of the URLs of your site in the form of a text file. These can then be submitted to search engines such as Yahoo! to notify them that all the pages exist and by doing so invites
their spider to visit.
XML Sitemaps
Google launched
Google Sitemaps as a way for webmasters to give them information they could use to better crawl their sites. This involves creating an XML Sitemap for which they provided their Google Sitemap Generator. This can
be the most complicated to set up using the tools provided by Google as you need to be running Python on your server. It’s perhaps the most important one too given the current dominance of the search engine.
Setting up all three types of sitemaps may seem a daunting task but luckily there are websites that take the strain out of this and you can create all three within a matter of minutes.
Whichever search engine or for whatever search purpose, sitemaps are clearly the fastest and most efficient way to navigate this digital highway. The best thing about it is, with these easy-to-use sitemap generators, you don’t have to be a computer geek to help keep this internet traffic moving.
Philip Nicosia is the webmaster of XML-Sitemaps.com, a site specialising in
sitemap software that generates XML, HTML
and TXT sitemaps for webmasters.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Philip_Nicosia
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