SEO, Social Media & eCommerce Talk @RTMLWise

There used to be a time not too long ago when a website consisted of pure html pages. Things were pretty simple both for designers and search engines. But the requirement of some nifty images, video and multimedia could not be met by these html pages. Around a few years back flash made its appearance. Macromedia (now purchased by Adobe) made a splash with flash. But this was the beginning of woes for SEO guys like me. During those days, I remember creating a pure flash site for an advertising agency. Continued absence from search engines was baffling to me till I realized that search spiders don’t take kindly to flash. I know the tech guys out there reading this post must be laughing their heads off, but let me assure you that not many knew that pure play flash sites were a no-no for SEO purposes. The reason was links. Since flash does not support html-like links, search spiders could not index the pages. This meant that search engines did not display these sites.

Lately client-side applications like AJAX and Javascript don’t support links which search bots can follow. Does it mean that we cannot use these software? Obviously not. In that case most of the Google applications would be discarded since they are based on AJAX. Google mashups like Google maps are one example of an AJAX based application. The solution is rather simple – sitemap. With sitemaps you can avoid the problems and issues which arise from use of flash, Javascript and AJAX. Use of sitemaps is unavoidable and it is better to understand sitemaps and incorporate them on your website than ignoring them.

Even if a part of your website is made up of flash or Ajax it is advisable to go for sitemaps. You can never be sure if all your web pages have been indexed if you don’t have a sitemap. Mostly search engines only index a part of your website which is not good for SEO.

Creating sitemaps is as simple as creating html pages. In fact you don’t need to know coding or software programming to incorporate sitemaps in a website. Many tools like Adobe Dreamweaver and Microsoft Publisher have inbuilt tools to create sitemaps on the click of a button. There are many free tools on the internet which can do the job as well. Once you have created a sitemap you can submit it directly to search engines. The sitemap provides a complete list of web pages and the links which can be easily accessed by the search spider. This will lead to quicker indexing and also ensure that all your web pages are indexed.

The good part about sitemaps is that the underlying protocol has been accepted by major search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN and ask.com. This means that you can submit your website sitemap to all these search engines simultaneously without making specific changes. Once you submit the sitemaps you can be sure that your website will be indexed much faster than by submitting your website. Additionally, your entire site would get indexed in the process.

Sitemaps are a must for efficient SEO and not there merely for ornamental purposes. Another thing which you must remember is that creating sitemaps is not a manual process. You must not attempt to create sitemap physically. You must use specific tools which will map your website and automatically create sitemaps. Why I am writing this is because of the confusion which I myself had in my mind (That was a few years back, so I am not ashamed to confess this now). Google sitemaps is a fantastic application which can be accessed through Google webmaster tool. I will discuss the details in my next post.

Now you know why sitemaps are critical for SEO purposes. Another reason why I would like to provide sitemaps is for navigation purposes. Users can view the sitemap and directly reach the web pages which they are interested in. Sometimes, navigating websites can get quite frustrating especially when the site is huge with many pages. With sitemaps users can find what they want faster and with ease.

Therefore sitemaps are important both for SEO and for navigation. This post would have certainly clarified some of the doubts SEO guys would have had about this subject. It will also dispel the belief that sitemaps are too technical to be approached by non techies. In my next post I will take up this topic and discuss some more aspects of sitemap creation and its relevance.