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Search Engine Optimization – 7 Lessons from Nairaland (Part 4)
Sitemaps Usage
Search engines sometimes have difficulty crawling your website or do not trust your website enough to crawl it deeply. In this case, only a sitemap created according to standards will ensure proper
crawling and hence optimization of your website. A sitemap simply is a file that contains all your links, their
importance to your website and their relation with one another. It gives search engines a bird’s eye view of your
website’s architecture and helps them get straight into the business site crawling rather than being caught up in
a resource-intensive link loop.
Also, when your sitemaps are regularly updated at a particular location where you have notified the major search
engines of, they will check the sitemaps periodically and index new links without crawling the already indexed old
links. This is good for your webserver, your bandwidth and the search engine bots. You see, those bots are just as
lazy as their creators and they would really love to get done with your website and move to the next one. 
. You
can even automatically ping the search engine bots after your sitemap has been created to notify them of updates.
Summarily, when you use sitemaps, your website gets crawled faster and the search engines will trust your content
before they get to index the same content your evil competitor stole from you so you can rank on top of search for
terms contained within that content.
Make sure you register with the webmaster sections of the major search engines and direct them to where your
sitemap(s) are located.
Learn more about sitemaps
Google Webmaster Tools
Microsoft Bing Webmaster Tools
Yahoo Site Explorer
Posted on June 19, 2011 at 7:05 pm in Tips |