Many people ask do sitemaps help SEO? Perhaps one of the most important things you can do for SEO is create a sitemap. By having a sitemap, you can tell search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing exactly where your content lives on the website. It will also help them find pages that may be buried and not linked to properly. There are many different kinds of sitemaps for SEO.
Different Kinds of SEO Sitemaps
HTML Sitemap: Here is an example of an HTML sitemap. It is a normal webpage that links to every page on your site. Google loves these sitemaps, especially if you make them easily accessible to Google. This allows them to crawl the sitemap and find all the pages on your site.
XML Sitemap: Yes, you should have both an HTML and an XML sitemap. The XML sitemap allows you to submit your pages directly to Google. Here is an excellent generator for an XML sitemap.
Video Sitemap: The video sitemap tells Google the pages that you feature videos on.
News Sitemap: Google news sitemaps allow you to be featured in Google news. There is quite a bit that goes into Google news sitemaps. You can learn more about them here.
Image Sitemap: Image sitemaps can get all of your images picked up in the Google image index. This can result in a great deal more SEO image traffic to your website.
Video on Google Sitemaps for SEO
In this video we hear from Google on whether you should use sitemaps for SEO. In the video they are talking specifically about XML sitemaps, which allow you to submit your sitemap directly to Google Webmaster tools. This tells Google about all of your new pages.
Now that you know sitemaps help SEO, get one of your own! We can create one for you if you like. Contact us today.
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