Make Your Blog Google Friendly With a Site Map

Gone are the days when getting listed in Google was a matter of employing the right keyword meta tags. Today its a bit more complicated and I want to share an simple word of advice to make Google like your blog a bit more and its called the site map. Why do you need a site map? Today you will find a couple of site map variants, Google XML sitemaps and HTML sitemap. Both are simple to create today with the availability of free resources all over the web. Blogs are very common right now. 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 terrific 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 site a lot 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 neighborhood 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 shoppers simply get frustrated and leave. This is the identical 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 interested in 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. To your success, Sharon Koenig The Prosperous Lady

A good backlink strategy is another important factor of an overall search engine optimization (SEO) technique. It works together with an XML site map to produce free traffic for your blog! See more of my internet marketing articles that I have written to help you get started as well as make your web-based business a success!