Search Marketing Blog
Enhance the Visibility of Your Re-designed Site with XML Sitemaps
If you are in the process of re-designing your site from the ground up, you know it has to be search engine friendly. You have spent days researching keywords. You have written relevant content with just the right mix of messaging and keyword density. And, you have developed the most accessible code possible. You are ready to launch . . . right? Well, not quite. Consider this: By changing your site’s previous file names and directory structures, you are essentially removing many – if not all – of the pages that have been assigned a PageRank by Google. Unfortunately, there is no way around this. But, one way to make sure that your new pages are crawled as fast a possible is to implement 301 redirects, and submit an XML Sitemap.
A Brief History
For those of you who are not familiar with XML Sitemaps, here is a brief history. Back in June 2005, Google launched a new service called Google Sitemaps, now called Google Webmaster Tools. The three main purposes for this Sitemaps service are:
- Enhance the Google’s ability to crawl Web sites by providing information on the specific location of site pages.
- Provide Webmasters with a way to inform Google that their site’s content had been updated.
- Allow Webmasters to notify Google with the priority in which they would like to have their pages crawled.
Late in 2006, Yahoo! and Microsoft also adopted the XML Sitemaps protocol. This development gave Webmasters the ability to inform all three major search engines that their sites had been updated.
How XML Sitemaps Can Help
Here is an important fact to be aware of: If your former site was not getting indexed on a regular basis, then more then likely. your new site will also not be rapidly indexed. Fortunately, you can speed up the indexing of your new site, by creating and submitting an XML Sitemap. Now that the three largest search engines support the Sitemaps 0.90 protocol, Webmasters have the ability to influence a key facet of achieving high search rankings: making sure the search engines know about all of your new site’s pages.
A Word of Caution
XML Sitemaps are not a substitute for having a properly optimized and accessible Web site. Therefore, you should never rely on a Sitemap as a vehicle for getting your pages crawled on a regular basis. They are simply an effective way to help ensure that the major search engines are aware that you have permanently moved content on your site.
