SEO

Sitemaps Help You Rank with Universal Search Dev Basu , Powered by Search - Oct 19, 2010

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Sitemaps help search engines discover content on your website that they otherwise may not have come across. Think of a sitemap as your way on knocking on a search engine's door to let it know of new or updated content on your site.

Adding a sitemap to your website is one of the most basic strategies to get deep content crawled and indexed by search engines. The trouble is, most people only stick to the two most common kinds -- HTML based sitemaps and XML based sitemaps that contain a list of the different URLs on their website.

Sitemaps come in many different flavors and formats and can be very useful at getting everything from rich media content inclusion in universal search to getting your news or press release updates included on Google or Yahoo News.

Let's review the 6 kinds of sitemaps:

HTML Sitemaps

HTML site maps are the most commonplace, usually a webpage with an index of every other page on your website. Search engines follow these links much like they would from any other webpage on your site.

XML Sitemaps

XML Sitemaps, or machine sitemaps, contain more information about your website's URLs including how frequently they are updated and how each URL is prioritized relative to other pages on the site. This sitemap format is accepted by the major search engine webmaster tools platforms.

Image Sitemaps

Do you want to be included in image search or universal search that features images? One of the best ways to do so is to include an image sitemap. Image sitemaps can also include the geographical location of the image, which can help it get indexed on Google earth or on Google maps.

While there are many free generators available online, you can combine the three sitemaps above into one main sitemap using a low cost tool such as XML-Sitemaps.com Unlimited Sitemap Generator.

Video Sitemaps

Do you have video content that you'd rather host on your own site rather than on third party sites such as YouTube? If so, then a video sitemap is crucial to getting these videos recognized and even included in universal search results. The Google video extension of the Sitemap protocol enables you to give Google descriptive information, such as a video's title, description, duration, that makes it easier for users to find a particular piece of content. Google may use text available on your video's page rather than the text you supply in the Sitemap's video content, if this differs. Google can crawl Flash SWF objects and the following raw video file types: .mpg, .mpeg, .mp4, .mov, .wmv, .asf, .avi, .ra, .ram, .rm, .flv. All files must be accessible via the web. One handy tool is Video Sitemap Pro for both Windows and Mac.

News Sitemaps

If you publish local news or run a content website that offers newsworthy information, getting syndicated on major news aggregators such as Google and Yahoo News can drive huge amounts of traffic to your site. If you run your site on a popular platform such as WordPress, there are plug-ins available to make generating a news sitemap easy. Plug-ins are available for other content management systems, but you should make sure they follow Google's news sitemap guidelines.

Geo-Sitemaps (KML)

Geo-sitemaps are very useful if you operate or manage a brick and mortar business, or have a chain of franchises. Including a geo-sitemap enable your locations to be found on Google Earth and also have a positive effect on Google Places rankings as they add to the "user content" ranking factors. To generate a geo-sitemap you can use the Uprise Geo sitemap and KML generator (beta).

Dev Basu is the owner of Powered by Search, a Toronto SEO Company and Internet Marketing agency specializing in SEO, Local Search, Paid Search, and Social Media solutions for small to medium businesses and national enterprise clients. Follow Dev on Twitter for more Local SEO tips and tricks.