Thursday, March 02, 2006

Google Sitemaps

At a recent e-biz expo event in Nottingham, someone from Google recommended their own Sitemaps as a way of getting a new site listed quicker in Google.
Essentially Sitemaps is an xml version of the standard site map html file (of all the internal links on your site) that your website should really have. Traditionally you submitted this html file to the search engines to make it a little easier for the robots to find & follow your site.
Briefly, in this Sitemap xml file, there are the links to each page & also the date of publication plus instructions to google's robot re: when to recrawl your site.
For most people creating and maintaining this xml file would be too much trouble or frankly beyond them. However, CoffeeCup have taken the pain out of this. Their Google Sitemapper costs a mere $29 & does everything you need to crawl your site, create the sitemap (& an html version) & then upload it to your server.
We now use it for every site we produce. What once took a considerable amount of time is now done in seconds. Well worth taking it for a test drive.