Sitemaps and their SEO importance

A sitemap is a list of pages of a web site accessible to crawlers or users.  It can be either a document in any form used as a planning tool for web design, or a web page that lists the pages on a web site, typically organized in a hierarchical fashion.

Google introduced Google Sitemaps so web developers can publish links from across their sites.  The basic premise is that some sites have a large number of dynamic pages that are only available through the use of forms and user entries.  The Sitemap files can then be used to indicate to a web crawler how such pages can be found.

Since Bing, Yahoo, Ask, and Google use the same protocol, having a Sitemap lets the four biggest search engines have the updated page information. Sitemaps do not guarantee all links will be crawled, and being crawled does not guarantee indexing.

However, a Sitemap is still the best insurance for getting a search engine to learn about your entire site.  XML Sitemaps have replaced the older method of “submitting to search engines” by filling out a form on the search engine’s submission page.  Now web developers submit a Sitemap directly, or wait for search engines to find it.

You can use Eden to submit your sitemap to Google.  By doing this, you will alert Google and the other search engines whenever you add pages to your site, ensuring that they are crawled and indexed sooner rather than later.

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