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Why Should I Have a Sitemap?

By Linda J Baldridge
©2005-2011 Linda J Baldridge-BIZ USA INC.












BIZ USA Online provides small business resource guide for new entrepreneurs and a business directory for business websites, business owners.
Who is BIZ USA Online? BIZ USA Online is a free small business advertising agency and resource center, founded by a women entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs. We created this site to be your resource center for articles about starting your own business and becoming a fist time entrpreneur, advertising agency for small business solutions. Inside our site you will find tips and suggestions on how to get started owning a business, practical information to help you grow your business from an idea to an actual business model. At BIZ USA Online we offer a free business directory to advertise your small business listing, you are more than welcome to signup here for a small business listing. BIZ USA Online:: Monroe, WA::  Small Business Resource Guide, Small Business Advertising Agency, Entrepreneur Resource Guide, Small Business Tips, Idea Into Reality, Free Business Listing, Free Advertising For Small Business, Small Business Directory, Small Business Domain Names, Small Business Plans, Business Startups, Business Consulting Firms, Business Structures, Small Business Financing, Legal Requirments, Product Market Research, Advertising & Marketing Your Small Business, Managment of Small Business

©2009 BIZ USA INC. All Rights Reserved.
What is a Sitemap file and why should I have one? In general, there are two types of sitemaps. The first type of sitemap is a HTML page listing the pages of your site - often by section - and is meant to help users find the information they need.

XML Sitemaps - usually called Sitemaps, with a capital S - are a way for you to give Google information about your site. This is the type of Sitemap we'll be discussing in this article.

In its simplest terms, a Sitemap 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.

Sitemaps are very helpful if you have:

  • Dynamic content.
  • Your website is new and has few links to it.
  • Has a large archive of content pages that are not well linked to each other, or are not linked at all.
  • Web pages change on your site.
  • The date each page was last modified.
  • The relative importance of pages on your site.
  • Search engines crawl more of your site and in a less amount of time.

Sites are never penalized for submitting Sitemaps.

Google adheres to Sitemap Protocol 0.9 as defined by sitemaps.org. The Sitemap Protocol is a dialect of XML for summarizing Sitemap information that is relevant to web crawlers. Sitemaps created for Google using Sitemap Protocol 0.9 are therefore compatible with other search engines that adopt the standards of sitemaps.org.

While a standard Sitemap works for most sites, you can also create and submit specialized Sitemaps for certain types of content. These Sitemap formats are specific to Google and are not used by other search engines. They're a good way to give Google detailed information about specific content types. For example, publishers can use News Sitemaps to give Google information that can appear in Google News search results, such as publication date, keywords, and stock ticker symbol. Sitemap formats include: