Wednesday, April 22, 2009

What is Sitemaps?


In its simplest terms, Sitemap is a list of the pages on your website. In general, there are two types of the sitemaps is there.

1. The first type of sitemap is a HTML page listing the pages of your site.
2. And the secound one is XML Sitemaps - usually called Sitemaps, with a capital S - are a way for you to give Google information about your site.

By Creating and submitting a Sitemap helps make sure that Google knows about all the pages on your site, including URLs.

Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.

What is a navigational search?

When searchers use a commercial web search engine to go to a specific website, the search query is classified as a navigational search.Navigational searches are more common than one might imagine. In fact, you probably perform navigational searches without realizing it.

For example, suppose you want to go to eBay to do a little shopping. How do you arrive at eBay’s home page? Do you:

1. Go to the address bar in your preferred web browser (Firefox, Explorer, etc.) and type in: www.ebay.com?

2. Go to Google and type in the word “ebay” (without the quotes) and click on the first link in the search engine results page (SERP)?

3. Use the search function in your browser toolbar and type in the word “ebay” (without the quotes) and click on the first link in the SERP?

4. Look through your bookmarks and select the eBay option?


If you do numbers 2 and/or 3, you have performed a navigational search on a web search engine. You are using Google, or your preferred web search engine, to navigate to eBay’s home page.

Navigational keywords are the words, phrases, abbreviations, and portions of domain names and URLs that web searchers use to go your website via the commercial web search engines. For any SEO project, you should always make it easy for searchers to find your official company website.