Article: Why Google Site Maps is a Website Must Have

A Review of Google Site Maps

A little history…

Google Site Maps is a free service provided by Google. It was launched in early 2006. Google has since then listened to fellow web developers and internet gurus, adding a few more features in the recent few months. It's a great start to any Internet Marketing or Search Engine Optimization campaign.

What you can do with it ….

There are any things Google Site Maps can help you do. These things include: seeing errors in the crawler has when crawling your website, shows the keywords your website places at top along with the average place in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page) where your listing appears, ability to see what links Google sees that are pointing to your website, page rank statistics, common keywords between your website and the links pointing to your website and other tools but these are the most important.

Why Google Site Map is a website must have …

It is a must have because it saves time and energy for you. And, who doesn't want to save time in this day and age? All you basically have to do is check one page per day to make sure all pages of your website are included in the index. With the sitemap tool, you can tell if the crawler is reporting errors. If it is you know you have work to do. You will need to fix theses errors.

It is also the quickest and easiest way to get you pages in Google. Even if your website was launched yesterday. It also gives you a report on the last time Google accessed your homepage, the average pages crawled each day, the page with the highest page rank, the anchor text in your website's content compared to the anchor text in incoming links to your website.

Researching for SEO ( Search Engine Optimization) purposes?

Well you will probably want to know what keywords are working for you in Google and what ones aren't. With Site Maps it's as easily as turning on your computer. Log in and click on the 'statistics' tab and then click  'query stats'. This will show you a list of the top search queries and your position within those. It will also show you a list top search queries and ones in which the visitor clicks through to your website. Simply put this gives you a list of what SEO campaigns is working for your website and which are not.

Conclusion….

If you have a new website and don't have all your website's pages in the Google index, this is the best place to start and the quickest with guaranteed results. It is one of the easiest resources for the beginner and advanced webmaster. If you like the idea of having  quick stats about your website available to you, try Google Analytics.

Alicia Harper (owner)
Vancouver Web Design