My Sitemap Article - The SEO Advantage

  • Posted by Fitz
  • November 11, 2006

WM-SiteMap-Article.JPGI recently wrote an article for Website Magazine about the SEO advantages of sitemaps. The general premise of the article is that by simply adding a sitemap to a website noticeable increases in traffic and rankings are almost assured. And adding a sitemap, more than any other ‘one thing’ a web designer can do, will effect the most noticeable benefits.

I wrote this article out of experience. Many clients I have consulted with have the classic web designer’ block to their SEO efforts. Everyone in this field knows what I am referring to; The web designer / master that doesn’t want to admit he didn’t design a perfect website initially and who puts up endless obsticles and complaints about the changes recommended by the SEO Consultant.



Many times when dealing with this situation I ask the client to insist the webmaster at minimum add a sitemap and a text link to that sitemap from every page of the site. 90% of the time this is a reasonable request to the defensive web designer so it gets done.

Now here is the amazing thing; I’ve seen on a number of occasions the sites that have only implemented a sitemap show dramatic SEO effects. And I’ve seen it often enough that I wrote an article about it.

But I will say this in addition - a good ‘footer navigation’ can have similar advantages. The overall idea is just to provide a way for search engines to easily find a website’s pages. Getting those pages indexed is the most basic step to SEO.

Let me know if you have any questions or comments. I’d love to hear from you.

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November 11th, 2006
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Comment Number:
1
Written by:
Alan Trombetta
Posted on:
December 23, 2006 at 12:22 pm

Hello John,

I read your excellent article on Sitemaps.

My sitemaps works well and I only know this from the many high rankings
I receive on Google.

But when I took your advice to find out more, by entering my URL in
Google, all I got was a page error?

What could be wrong?

I tried all of these combinations….

site:newgrip.com/index.html

site:www.newgrip.com/index.html

site:www.newgrip.com

No matter what I tried all I got was an error message.

Alan Trombetta
owner and product developer
www.NewGrip.com
Let Grips take the punishment - not your hands or wrists
1-800-213-0450 Pacific Time (Portland, OR)

Comment Number:
2
Written by:
John
Posted on:
January 9, 2007 at 3:39 pm

@ Alan, try…

site:newgrip.com

Comment Number:
3
Written by:
Tricia
Posted on:
January 14, 2007 at 8:49 pm

I, too, read your article on the advantage of sitemaps. I already do PPC on google, yahoo and kanoodle. If I use a sitemap do I need to continue to pay for the higher rankings?

Thanks,
Tricia

Comment Number:
4
Written by:
John
Posted on:
January 24, 2007 at 1:45 pm

@ Tricia,

A sitemap can in NO WAY replace a PPC campaign. PPC is a contract between you and a search engine. You pay, they send traffic. It’s a business arrangement. It’s very straight forward. The advantage of a sitemap is more subtle.

A sitemap is a form of communication with the search engines. It tells the search engine where to find your pages. It can also tell them what keywords you feel are appropriate to those pages. But as with any communication it is up to the other party to listen and act on what is said. This is primarily the difference between SEO (example: sitemap) and sponsored marketing (example: PPC). One is a business arrangement and the other a form of suggestion.

Nothing can be guaranteed with in the world of SEO. It’s simply a way to give your self a better chance than a non-optimized competitor.

I hope this makes sense.