Today it was announced that there was a new study on Sitemaps at the WWW’09 conference in Madrid. Some of you may be interested in reading the full report or viewing the power point. The one part that I found to be very interesting was that 78% of URLs were seen by Sitemaps first, compared to 22% that were seen through discovery first (aka craled by a search engine spider through links). This really inforces the importants of creating an XML sitemap and making sure it’s up-to-date. The more ways a search engine can reach your content the more likely it will be indexed and at a faster pace.
Ways to get your content indexed…
- Create an XML sitemap.
- Create an HTML sitemap.
- Internal linking; link from your other pages.
- External linking; links from other websites to your content.
Learn more about xml sitemaps at sitemaps.org.