What is a Sitemap?
A Sitemap is nothing but a list of accessible pages in your website. Sitemaps helps search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing to easily crawl pages in your site which helps in better index.There are actually two kinds of Sitemaps, one for your website visitors (commonly referred to simply as a ‘site map’) and one for search engine crawlers (commonly referred to as an XML Sitemap).
>Here is how Google Webmaster tools defines a “XML Sitemap”:
Sitemaps are a way to tell Google about pages on your site we might not otherwise discover. In its simplest terms, a XML Sitemap—usually called Sitemap, with a capital S—is a list of the pages on your website. Creating and submitting a Sitemap helps make sure that Google knows about all the pages on your site, including URLs that may not be discoverable by Google’s normal crawling process.
>So, what is a regular “site map” you ask?
A regular site map is much like the one you can find here. It’s set up to give your website’s visitors a quick and easy way to find what they’re looking for. You generally list out all the pages (with the proper links) of your website that you’d like an every-day visitor to see. For example, you would not list pages for your free downloads if you require your visitors to optin to your list to receive those. You would, however, list the page where they could learn about your freebie and opt-in.
Do I actually need a sitemap?
If you have a small website with just a handful of pages all of which are all listed on and easily accessed via your main menu, no, you probably don’t need a sitemap.
If you have a larger website with pages that aren’t easily accessed through your main menu then a sitemap is a good idea. If you don’t want to go through the trouble of creating an XML sitemap to submit to search engines it is a good idea to at least have a site map for your website’s visitors.
Why would you want a ‘site map’ for your visitors if you’re skipping the XML Sitemap for search engines? Well, even if you have a ‘search’ box in your sidebar or menu area it can be frustrating if a visitor comes to your site looking for something and searches for it but doesn’t find it. That does happen, trust me. Your visitor may be looking for something very specific but using different terminology than you do, they may not think to search for that item using your specific terms. If they see your terminology readily displayed in a site map they will most likely recognize what they’re looking for and click-through to it.
Adding your Blogger sitemap in robots.txt file:
Login to your Blogger blog and go to dashboard >> settings >> search preferences and edit the custom robots.txt. Enable and paste the following text and click save changes. Make sure to change your blog name in Blogger sitemap below.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /search
Allow: /
Sitemap: http://Bloggerplanet.com/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=500
So whenever search engines crawls your site they will access your Blogger sitemap from robots.txt file.
Customize:
Replace the highlighted links in RED with your own url
Submit Blogger Sitemap To Google Webmaster Tools:
- "Sign in" or" Sign up" to Google Webmaster Tools.
- Add your Website to Google Webmaster
- Click on Sitemaps button on the site Dashboard as shown below.
- At the top right corner of the page, press Add/Test sitemap button. add/test sitemap
- Once you click the button, a small box will appear as shown in the screenshot below.
- Add the below code in the text field.
atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=500
- This is the sitemap code for your blogger blog which you need to add.
Press “Submit Sitemap” button.
Refresh the page.
Congratulation! You have finished the process of submitting your blog sitemap.
Note: The above sitemap will work for 500 posts only. If you have more than 500 posts published in your blog, then you have to add one more sitemap. Whole procedure will be same but at this time you have to add this code.
atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=501&max-results=500
The sitemap which we submit to Google Webmaster Tools is a XML sitemap which is used by search engines to find our content easily. There is HTML sitemap too which is for our blog readers. We should add sitemap page to our blog so that our readers can easily view all of our blog posts at the single location. It’ll be easy for them to read post which they want to. If you don’t know how to add a sitemap page in blogger, then here is a tutorial for you.
If you have any doubt in your mind, you may ask via comments or contact form.
DON'T FORGET TO "SUBSCRIBE" or"LIKE" FOR FURTHER UPDATES
Post a Comment