First introduced in 2005, Google Sitemaps is a service that allows web developers and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Firms to submit an index of web pages of a web site to Google. Sitemaps uses the XML-Sitemap format (XSLT) and was adopted by other major search engines as well – Ask.com, Yahoo! and MSN Search. The advantage of sitemaps is the ability to keep search engines up-to-date with changes to a website. This facilitates the indexing of a website and helps more relevant and recent updates to be available for searching.
While a standard sitemap may be a great for most sites, SEO marketing experts may create and submit sitemaps in five specialized formats. These are content-specific and Google-specific formats which give Google’s search crawlers an in-depth look into the site.
- Video Sitemaps
Publish and syndicate online video content along with the appropriate metadata using Video Sitemaps. This enables video content to be made searchable by the Google Video index. The meta data provides details that will make searches for your video more relevant. - Mobile Sitemaps
Serving a mobile client base is increasingly important as more and more users employ WAP and iMode standards while browsing from their cell phones and PDAs. Mobile Sitemaps provide a list of URLs for mobile-specific content. - News Sitemaps
If your web site is included in Google News, then adding a News Sitemap is the best way of ensuring regular updates by spiders to your content. This sitemap allows flexibility with respect to subscription services as well as publication labels, i.e. granting sites the ability to post content under a variety of labels to target different demographics. - Code Sitemaps
The Google Code Search finds publicly accessible source codes. This sitemap is particularly good for programmers and developers who post their code in the public domain, since they can add details regarding function definitions, etc. - Geo Sitemaps
As more and more websites, especially blogs, embed Google Maps into their web pages, Google provides the Geo sitemap service which allows you to add Geo-specific tags to the sitemap file. This exposes the search engine to data in the KML (Google Earth) files, allowing traffic to perform even more advanced searches across embedded maps.
Sitemaps essentially supplement, without replacing, the existing web crawler based indexing mechanisms. The crawlers can do a more thorough job of indexing a web site when a sitemap is present. There is,however, no guarantee that every page present in a sitemap will be accessed by the crawlers and indexed for searching. It is therefore never certain whether a sitemap is truly an SEO tool that will change site rankings. Nevertheless, a sitemap provides a comprehensive layout of a website and is a practice that will present your traffic with more details of your products and services.