Gone are the times when getting listed in Google was a matter of using the proper keyword meta tags. Today its a bit more complex and I want to share a simple word of advice to make Google like your site a bit more and its known as the site map.
Why do you need a site map?
Today there are a couple of website map variants, Google XML sitemaps and HTML sitemap. Both are simple to create nowadays with the availability of free tools all over the internet. Blogs are very popular at this time. So, it is no surprise that finding a WordPress plug-in that satisfies this requirement is simple to find.
Having a sitemap is really a fantastic idea to help visitors hit more of your pages. I remember looking at my traffic stats before I had the site map installed on my blog and noticed that I had fewer page views. Since I added the sitemap, the page views have increased by 50%. Simply by placing the XML sitemap file on your server, it enables Google's robots (a.k.a. "bots") to crawl your web blog much easier and thereby communicating to the Google search engine that your site is user friendly and easy to navigate. Let me share with you where Google is coming from for a better understanding.
Your local shopping mall has a site map. So, why doesn't your web site?
Think of how a "brick and mortar" grocery store or shopping mall would structure their store if they wanted to sell you the products that they carry. They want to make your experience pleasant so that you spend more time there and buy more items. If products are too challenging to find people simply get frustrated and leave. This is precisely the same premise that Google follows by putting the sitemap suggestion in their guide. Note that just because Google is one of the most popular sites (I think Facebook just moved into #1), doesn't mean that you are adding a sitemap just for Google. I want to point out that the other search engines use it too. So keep in mind that Yahoo!, Ask and Bing are following the search engine giant by enjoying the XML sitemap file on your server as well.
The "bots" love your sitemap.
Keep in mind that the search engine bots are not as enthusiastic about crawling and gobbling up the posts that you write as they are the pages that you have on your site or blog. So, it makes sense to keep the pages easily accessible for the search engines. Doing so will in turn give your posts much better prominence on the search engines. People searching for the keywords that you are trying to rank your pages and posts for will be able to find your information much easier. So, in this way your pages (and posts) will be ranked provided that you are implementing some on-page SEO techniques.
Now that you know the benefits of installing a sitemap on your site and how simple it is to do, I hope you take advantage of this little tip soon to help improve your visitors' experience as well as for the search engines' robots.
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