Google Sitemaps < The Organic SEO

Google Sitemaps

16 May 2006 at 07:55 by Eric Morgan

Google sitemaps can help with SEO efforts as well as give you some insight as to how Google views your website.

Create a Sitemaps Account
If you are new to Google sitemaps you can setup a new Google Sitemaps account; you will need a Google account first. After that you simply enter in your website url, upload a page for Google to verify you have access to the website, then upload sitemaps.

How Google Indexes your Website
Once you have an account setup and the website verified you can gain some valuable information on how Google views your website. The first tab on the top, diagnostics, can show you how Google is crawling and indexing your website. You can see when it was last visited by the Googlebot and if there are any errors that the spider encountered when visiting your website. These can be found under the lefthand menu such as "unreachable urls" and "urls timed out". You should check each of these error sections and resolve any issues Google has with indexing your pages.

How Google Views your Website Theme
After you have fixed any indexing problems Google has with your site click on the statistics tab on the top. This is where you can get a small glimpse of what Google views your website theme to be. This is useful for search engine optimization purposes. The first menu item on the left is query stats. This show what google recognizes as pages your website comes up for the most of keyword phrases that are searched for in Google's search engine. The next column is the top search query clicks; this is what Google recognizes as the search terms people actually visit your site for. Whatever these terms are is the first glimpse of how Google views your website theme. If you website is a car dealership but people are somehow finding your page when they search for license plate registration then you are in trouble. Make sure the search terms listed are ones that are related to your business.

There is another menu item on the left called page analysis. This column will show similar information to the search query page but will show what Google views as actual words on your site to determine your website theme. Again, if you are a car dealership you would probably want words like "auto, car, new, ford, honda, etc." to be the most common words on your site. Keep in mind this is only how Google views your site; most likely you may see words that are not necessarily everywhere on your site come up in this section; however if Google has only indexed half of your site in their database and it happens to be the half that has a certain word in it a lot then this could cause that word to come up in this section. You have the most control over this and can go edit your webpage content to show specific words more often on your site. The other column is external links to your site; this section you do not have as much control over. This section shows the most common text in links that are pointing to your website from other locations on the internet.

Between these two sections you can get a good idea of the website theme Google recognizes for your site. You can make adjustments to make sure your theme is one that will make your website a successful online marketing tool.

Help Google Index your Website
Lastly you can use Google sitemaps to upload an .xml file that tells Google what pages are on your site, how often they are updated, and how important they are. There are several tools out there that will automatically make a sitemap .xml file for you to upload to Google; after trying several of them my favorite was Gsite Crawler. If you download this utility, have it scan your website, generate a xml file, then upload it in your Google sitemaps account. This will help Google index all your pages and re-index them on a regular basis. There are some other factors to consider when making the xml file but that is for another day, if you wish to learn more about it let us know and we will post that information as well.

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