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A sitemap is a special file that resides on your webserver that helps a search engine find all the web pages you have to offer. XML is a special format used by many types of programs, and it turns out to be handy for describing the pages in a web site. Search engines like XML, people, not so much.
You need a sitemap
Sitemaps offer the following benefits:
- Your visitors, prospects and customers will be directed to the most appropriate part of your web site, faster.
- Search engine tools such as Google Webmaster Tools leverage sitemaps to allow you to find broken links very quickly so that you don’t accidentally lose customers.
- Uploading a site map to a search engine will increase your search ranking much more rapidly than simply waiting for a spider to crawl the site, resulting in increased traffic from more qualified prospects. In fact, if your site is very new and has no links, it could be a long time before search engines even find it!
WordPress plugins generate sitemaps
Here at Website In A Weekend, we recommend using the Google XML Sitemaps plugin to automate both creating a sitemap and submitting the sitemap to the search engines. Using this plugin confers the following benefits:
- Save time by not having to learn the XML formatting rules required by the search engine to accept the site map, the plugin handles the format automatically.
- Save even more time by not having not manually add each new file (in the proper format of course) to the site map.
- More time saving: this handy plugin even submits the sitemap file to Google, Microsoft, Ask and Yahoo!
- Your latest posts are always added to the sitemap and submitted right after you publish, completely automatically.
All in all, the benefits for using the Google XML Sitemaps plugin are so valuable, it’s worth the few minutes it takes to install it!
