Easy sitemap shortcode

[sitemapscseo_postlister cat='XYZ' maxposts='5' orderby='date']

[sitemapscseo_postlister cat='Reviews' groupby='tag' orderby='title']

The purpose of a site map is to spell out your Web site’s central content themes and to show both search engine spiders and your visitors where to find information on your site. Traditional site maps are static HTML files that outline the first and second level structure of a Web site. The original purpose of a site map was to enable users to easily find items on the Web site. Over time, they also became useful as a shortcut method to help search engines find and index all the parts of a site. Today, you should have an XML site map, which effectively provides an easy-to-read link dump for the spiders to index. Although certain Web browsers can display an XML site map for users to read as well, you should offer both kinds of site maps (HTML and XML) if you want to be sure to cover both the search engines and your users. A site map displays the inner framework and organization of your site’s content to the search engines. Your site map reflects the way visitors intuitively work through your site. Years ago, site maps existed only as a boring series of links in list form. Today, they are thought of as an extension of your site. You should use your site map as a tool to lead your visitor and the search engines to more content. Create details for each section and subsection through descriptive text placed under the site map link. This helps your visitors understand and navigate through your site and also gives you more food for the search engines. A good site map does the following: Shows a quick, easy-to-follow overview of your site. Provides a pathway for the search engine robots to follow. Provides text links to every page of your site. Quickly shows visitors how to get where they need to go. Utilizes important keyword phrases. Site maps are very important for two main reasons. First, your site map provides food for the search engine spiders that crawl your site. The site map gives the spider links to all the major pages of your site, allowing every page included on your site map to be indexed by the spider. This is a very good thing! Having all of your major pages included in the search engine database makes your site more likely to come up in the search engine results when a user performs a query. Your site map pushes the search engine toward the individual pages of your site instead of making them hunt around for links. A well-planned site map can ensure your Web site is fully indexed by search engines. Here are some site map dos and don’ts: Your site map should be linked from your home page. Linking it this way gives the search engines an easy way to find it and then follow it all the way through the site. If it’s linked from other pages, the spider might find a dead end along the way and just quit. Small sites can place every page on their site map, but larger sites should not. You do not want the search engines to see a never-ending list of links and assume you are a link farm. (More than 99 links on a page looks suspicious to a search engine.) Most SEO experts believe you should have no more than 25 to 40 links on your site map. This also makes it easier to read for your human visitors. Remember, your site map is there to assist your visitors, not confuse them. The anchor text (words that can be clicked) of each link should contain a keyword whenever possible and should link to the appropriate page. When you create a site map, go back and make sure that all of your links are correct. All the pages shown on your site map should also contain a link back to the site map. Just as you can’t leave your Web site to fend for itself, the same applies to your site map. When your site changes, make sure your site map is updated to reflect that. What good are directions to a place that’s been torn down? Keeping your site map current helps make you a visitor and search engine favorite In the plugin settings, edit the 'HTML for each post' config and remove the [img] keyword. When it comes to improve your rankings, a XML sitemap can be a really good partner. This protocol helps Google and other main search engines to easily understand your website structure while crawling it. It was first introduced by Google in 2005, with MSN and Yahoo offering their support to the protocol a year later. Sitemaps are known as URL inclusion protocols as they advise search engines on what to crawl. It comes in opposition to robots.txt files that are an exclusion protocol as it tells search engines what not to crawl. The website Blue Corona made a good comparison between a XML sitemap and a blueprint for a house. Think of your website as a house and each page of your site as a room. You can think of a XML Sitemap like a blueprint for your house and each web page were a room, your XML Sitemap would be a blueprint—making it easy for Google, the proverbial home inspector of the web—to quickly and easily find all the rooms within your house In other words, a XML sitemap will ease Google to find your pages when it crawls your website because all your pages could be ranked, not only your website as a domain. It informs search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. While having no XML sitemap is not penalized, creating yours is highly recommended because it can improve your SEO. Why should you get a XML sitemap Like we said, having an efficient XML sitemap can improve your rankings. But this is particularly useful when: You have a website with a complicated structure or many internal links Your site is a new one or if you have just a few external links Your site is consistent and have archived content Your website has dynamic pages (mainly occurs for e-commerce website). Benefits of having a XML sitemap Having a sitemap on your site passes more data to search engines. So it also: Lists all URLs from your site. And this includes pages that would not have been foundable by search engines Gives engines page priority and thus crawl priority. You can add a tag on your XML sitemap saying which pages are the most important. Bots will thus first focus on this priority pages. Gives temporal information. You can also include two other optional tags that will pass extra data to search engines to help them crawl your website. The first one, “lastmod’ informs them when a page last changed. The second one, “changefreq” tells how often a page is likely to change. Gives you information back from the Google Webmaster Central. You can access googlebot activity for instance. How to set up your XML sitemap Creating your XML sitemap can be quite easy as many website content management systems offer the ability to automatically create yours. But if you use that solution, be sure that the output is in the correct format and is error-free. For Google, the required protocol is Sitemap Protocol 0.9. Your sitemap should: Begin with an opening tag and end with a closing tag. Specify the namespace (protocol standard) within the tag. Include a entry for each URL, as a parent XML tag. Include a child entry for each parent tag. And use UTF-8 encoding Then you must verify your XML sitemap with Google Webmaster Tool to ensure it is in the right format and correctly uploaded to your web server. For small websites that do not have content uploaded that often, you can use the XML Sitemap Generator. It allows you to define how often your pages are updated and what modified date is used. Once the generator has created your sitemap, you need to upload it to the root of your domain e.g. www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml. However, this tool is limited in many ways. You can only add five hundred pages, it defines the same “change frequency” for all URLs and is obviously not suitable for any website that publishes content every week as you want your home page spidered more frequently than other pages. If you are under WordPress and already using the plugin WordPress SEO by Yoast, keep it to create your sitemap because it is deadly simple. The website Elegantthemes published a nice guide to set up your sitemap with WordPress. mobile app mobile app content-adderpost-redirectmobile app pluginmap-and-contacthtml-sitemapmobile app pluginMobile app plugin