Sitemaps are something lots of people have actually heard about, but not everyone understands. In layman's terms, it's a way of alerting search engines about all the web pages in a site. When it comes to good website design they have become very important.
More specifically, a sitemap is an XML file that contains a listing of URLs, along with additional details for each URL such as when it was last updated, precisely how frequently it changes, and how necessary it is in relation to additional website URLs.
Sitemaps are used to help notify search engines about URLs readily available for crawling, enabling search engines to crawl the site a lot more intelligently. They are especially beneficial on internet sites utilizing Flash material not commonly processed by search engines or which have spots not accessible through the browsable user interface. Google, MSN, Bing, Ask and Yahoo! all support sitemaps, making it an easy method to submit an internet site for crawling.
Sitemaps are limited to 50,000 URLs and 10 megabytes per file. For huge sites which exceed these limitations, a sitemap index can be utilized to submit up to 1000 individual sitemap files|documents. Bandwidth consumption can be reduced by compressing with gzip.
The benefit of sitemaps is the fact that they make it simpler for search engines to recognize and index all of the webpages of a site. If you utilize a content management system such as wordpress then you can in fact set up a plugin that will create your sitemaps for you. There are a number of plugins labeled xml sitemaps that you can easily set up free of charge. When set up and activated the plugin will start doing its job instantly. And not only will the plugin create your sitemap for you but it will also inform the major search engines when you make a change to the web site that causes the sitemap to be updated. So manual submission of sites to the search engines is unneeded and your web pages are re-indexed within days.
One more wordpress benefit is that there are unique sitemap plugins specifically for video's and pictures that can be installed. If your web sites uses a lot of photos, video or both then you'll want to consider installing these plugins also. Specifically if your site has a number of web pages.
If your web site is html or php coded then you may probably have to create a sitemap from scratch and keep it updated manually. It will definitely be more time consuming but the advantages are evident as to why you want one for your web site. If you had a website designer develop your site for you ask if they have installed a sitemap or not. If they have not done so you'll want to ask then to do it.
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Titan Web Marketing Solutions is a Website Design, Search Engine Marketing and Graphic Design Company that focuses on helping small businesses attract new customers and increase sales. If you need a website designed for your business or are interested in how you can use local search, organic search, or pay per click to reach more customers then call us at 615-890-3600. Or visit http://www.titanwebmarketingsolutions.com for more information.
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