What's the difference between a sitemap and a Google sitemap and how can I use them to rank better?

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sitemap Google is lazy. OK, maybe not lazy, but at least efficient, meaning, because it must crawl 8 billion web pages daily, it wants to do it as effectively as possible. That means, its preferred method of crawling is to be able to find every page on a site within 2 leaps. A site that is set up to allow Google to crawl efficiently is considered to have flat architecture and gets deeper full site crawls more often than one that is not structured this way. I mean think about it, Google uses common sense. If a reader would have a hard time finding a post that is 5 or 6 pages deep, Google thinks, "well, since a user would have a problem finding this link, it must not be important and I shouldn't bother crawling it." Starting to see the importance of creating flat architecture for your real estate blog?

Recommended reading: What Laziness Taught Me about Flat Architecture

Read also: Real estate blog SEO tip: what a sitemap can do for you

OK, enough of the geeky explanation stuff. What it means in real life, is make sure your real estate blog has a crawlable sitemap accessible from every page of your site.

What is a sitemap?

A sitemap is a dynamically generated index of all pages on your blog. Essentially, a sitemap is a complete resource guide for readers and search engines including a list and description of each page on a site. If your homepage lands a search result and you have a sitemap on your site and it was indexed then each individual page within your site will automatically be indexed for you. How wonderful is that? The use of a sitemap doesn't guarantee that a page will be indexed immediately after you hit that save button, but the use of a sitemap provides hints for web crawlers to find new and changed content on your site.

See what a sitemap looks like: Real Estate Blog Sitemap

RSS PIECES CLIENTS ONLY: this is a standard feature of your blog. Your sitemap is located in the footer of your real estate blog. Just click on the link that says "sitemap" and you will get it.

Read also: The importance of using a sitemap on your real estate blog

Why should you get a sitemap today?

Improve search engine optimization by making sure that all pages can be found easily.

Simple to use for readers to locate information they are looking for quickly without leaving your site.

Sitemaps are key to visibility.

It's an easy way for search engines to be notified of any changes or new content.

Read Also: The Importance of Sitemaps

Where is the best place to place a sitemap?

No question, your footer is the best place to put a sitemap.

How can you best implement a sitemap?

Make sure that you use a plugin or feature of your blog platform that auto generates an updated sitemap for your blog.

Set page to no-index, follow to avoid the page being penalized for having too many links or set Google style pagination on the site.

Is this the sitemap I should submit to Google?

No. A Google sitemap or XML sitemap is another auto generated sitemap that is provided in XML format. This is the sitemap you ought to submit to Google's webmaster tools. This type of sitemap tells Google how often to crawl the site and how important each type of page is. For example, you can easily boost the importance (levels go from 0-1) of listing pages by setting the priority higher for those types of pages. Your homepage should always have the most importance and be set at an importance level of 1 as it is the landing page for your site and where most of your backlinks should be pointed to.

See a Google Sitemap

Google offers a sitemap tool which is now part of Google Webmaster Tools. You can use Google Sitemaps for sites that don't include a sitemap or that have a sitemap that is not of good quality. This tool will allow you to create your own sitemap, submit it to Google, and keep track of stats.

RSS PIECES CLIENTS ONLY: your Google sitemap is located at www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.php

Example: See a New Hampshire real Estate Blog Sitemap

RSS Pieces SEO tools

Posted on March 26, 2008 15:42:28 by Blog Author

Mary.McKnight

Posted in SEO

Comment from: Jill Wente [Visitor]

· http://www.SpringTexasBlog.com

Thanks, Mary. I just checked and my blog and no site map. Its at the top of my agenda now.

Permalink March 26, 2008 19:46:06

Comment from: Luke [Visitor]

· http://10kluke.info/

I like the Google XML Sitemaps Plugin for Wordpress, as it makes it easy to generate these for a blog. Is this as good as the Google based sitemap generator?

Permalink March 26, 2008 20:16:32

Comment from: Karl Burger [Visitor]

· http://www.pensacolarealestatenews.com

Thank you Mary for another great post. I was just working on my site map tonight. No, I don't get it done automatically for me. I manually created one and add links as I add articles. I was concerned about going over the max links on this page, but you helped by telling me about the "no index, follow" attribute. Did you ever do a post on how to set this? My site map is at 107 links, so I'm about to need to add this setting. Thanks so much for all the great advice.

Permalink March 26, 2008 23:52:48

Comment from: Mary.McKnight [Member]

· http://www.rsspieces.com

Karl,
Like Luke said, there are a number of plugins for WordPres you could use that generate onpage site maps and Google XML sitemaps. You should expect your webmaster to do that for you as it is a standard component of any website and would help with the indexability of your site.

Permalink March 27, 2008 05:22:38

Comment from: xHydra [Visitor]

· http://www.xHydra.com

Sitemaps are the express highway to google’s index.

Every website on the internet should have a sitemap to make search engine spidering more efficient. I also use the <a href=”http://www.xhydra.com/internet/creating-a-site-map.html”>Sitemap generator</a> by Arne Brachhold

once again thanks for the great article

Permalink May 03, 2008 04:37:29

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