Positive Real Estate Professionals

In today’s time, Sitemaps are important to the search engines and to your website. I could leave it at that and hope that all of you take my word for it based on the SEO success this real estate network has. However, I am not gullible enough to believe that I can just say it and people will believe it. Most people do not even know the importance of the sitemap, so they think that it is no more than a waste of space. In reality, sitemaps are much more than that. In today’s article, I am going to attempt to explain the importance of having a sitemap of your website.

Back in July, Chris Fisher of StagersLIST Websites wrote an article entitled Site maps for the search engines. In her article, she talked about the importance of having a sitemap. While I agreed with her article, I did not realize the importance much less the difference in sitemaps that are HTML versus sitemaps that are XML. Since our real estate network had it’s first issue with our sitemaps, I started seeing what the differences are.

The main issue deals with the three major search engines; Google, Yahoo, and MSN (BING). Google uses XML for their sitemaps and the main reason I like these is because they run in the background. However, Yahoo and MSN uses HTML sitemaps, and these are not running in the background. I guess the first thing that we must understand is what XML and HTML files are. XML stands for EXtensible Markup Language and is a markup language much like HTML. It was designed to describe data and uses a DTD (Document Type Definition) to formally describe the data. In the case of HTML, it stands for Hyper Text Markup Language and it is not a programming language, it is a markup language, similar to that of the XML files. For most people, you are probably still lost. However, for the sake of this article, we are going to leave the description where it is and just understand they are different.

Google uses XML files for their sitemaps. In fact, with Wordpress and Wordpress MU, there is a plugin that is called Google XML Sitemaps. We have worked hard to fix any issues with this plugin for our network as it is one of the tools that we use in our SEO. What I love about it is that it works in the background and is seamless. However, with Yahoo and MSN, they are using the HTML files, therefore they require a page that is active. This was the original reason that web designers always added a sitemap when they built a new site. While the XML file has the ability to submit to Yahoo and MSN, it is the belief of this web designer that having a XML and a HTML sitemap will give you the best returns for your website.

Let’s take a look at some of the benefits of having a sitemap:

• Site maps can improve search engine optimization of a site by making sure that all the pages can be found.
• This is especially important if a site uses Macromedia Flash or JavaScript menus that do not include HTML links.
• Most search engines will only follow a finite number of links from a page, so if a site is very large a sitemap may be required so that search engines and visitors can access all content on the site.

In closing, Sitemaps are very important to the success of your web site. Ultimately, these files tell the search engines what pages within the site need to be indexed. It can also help tell the search engines what pages or articles are new. In a nutshell, it provides communication between the search engines and your web site. In the near future, I truly believe that this will be the way of submitting new content to search engines.