Sitemaps

There are two kinds of sitemaps these days, and both are equally important. The first and best-known sitemap is a visitor sitemap, which is a document published on your website that links to every page on the site. This sitemap allows visitors to find what they're looking for easier. Click here to view our visitor sitemap.

The second kind of sitemap is relatively new, and has taken the world of Internet marketers by storm. This is the search engine sitemap, and it is essential to having good search engine standing. Instead of relying solely on spiders these days, the major search engines allow webmasters to submit their own sitemaps for inclusion. This makes sure the search engines don't miss any of your pages, and makes sure that all pages on your website get indexed.

Web River Group specializes in the construction of both visitor sitemaps and search engine sitemaps. Above all else, we always make sure to please the Internet's two most-traveled search engines and their sitemap guidelines. For Google, we create a site-wide XML sitemap, and for Yahoo we create a site-wide TXT sitemap. Once these are submitted to the respective search engines, your site will be indexed correctly virtually everywhere.

For examples of search engine sitmaps, click here to view Web River Group. Com's Google-specific XML sitemap, and click here to view Web River Group. Com's Yahoo-specific TXT sitemap.

If you'd like to take a stab at creating your own sitemaps, please follow some of the free guidelines below and contact us if we can assist you in any way.

Sitemap Guidelines:

1. Sign up! The first step to getting search engines to recognize and index your web pages is to create webmaster accounts with them. This will allow them to recognize your presence, and give you access to various tools that are invaluable in improving your website's ranking and status. Use the following two links to get you started:

   1. Google Webmaster Central

   2. Yahoo for Webmasters

2. Generate Your SE Sitemap. Even if you know XML and TXT languages, there's really no sense in going through line by line and building your own search engine sitemap. Check out some of the tools below that will do it for you.

   1. XML Sitemaps - for XML and TXT sitemap generation.

   2. Dagon Design - for Wordpress powered sites.

   3. ROR Web - for ROR sitemaps.

3. Create Your Visitor Sitemap. Many websites have simple sitemaps that contain just a list of links. While this is okay, we highly recommend making your visitor sitemap look just like the rest of your website. Don't underestimate how many people will visit your sitemap and use it as a resource for finding various sections and pages on your website. Keep it simple, but make it look good too!

4. Update It. It is important to update your sitemaps as often as you update your site. Whether search engine sitemaps or visitor sitemaps, they must be an accurate, up-to-date representation of the material on your website. Any old, broken or missing links are not going to help you in the eyes of the search engines.