Sitemaps
A Step-By-Step Guide to Small Business SEO
Small business websites and internet start-ups need to consider content development as part of their SEO strategy. Crucially, you need to ensure that your site content can be crawled and indexed efficiently. One method to assist with this is to make use of a sitemap. This section of my guide looks at sitemaps for SEO; considering the reasons why you should implement one before your website launches. This article follows on from Part Twelve: Web Analytics. To go back to the start of my guide click here.
Generating Sitemaps
You can generate a sitemap using a free service such as the one offered by XML-sitemaps.com. You will need to set-up a Google Webmaster Account to implement this (which will require you to add some custom code to your header file). Alternatively, if you are using a content management system such as WordPress, you can use a Google Sitemap plug-in.
Although sitemaps won’t necessarily improve your rankings for existing pages, they can enable more of your pages to be indexed and can help to determine how often search engine robots come to visit your site. This enables you to:
- Reduce the discrepancy between actual pages that exist on your site against actual pages indexed by Google (reducing the time you might spend running “site:” and “inurl:” syntax searches as mentioned in Part Eleven: Competitor Benchmarking).
- Monitor pages that Google is unable to crawl and implement the necessary changes required to correct this.
- Specify relative precedence of pages within your site on a priority scale of 0 to 1 allowing you to indicate preferential pages for index inclusion.
- Specify crawl frequency for page types and categories (although the robots will not necessarily follow these instructions).
Generating a sitemap is one of the final technical considerations that small business owners should be aware of before preparing to launch a new company or e-commerce website with SEO on the agenda. The remainder of this guide will now be focused on the tasks and techniques that can be implemented once your website has launched. This includes “on-page” SEO factors for improving your site content plus “off-page” strategies such as link-building, offline promotions and social media engagement.
Sitemaps for SEO Checklist
- Install a sitemap prior to your website’s launch
- Configure your sitemap to specify preferences
- Monitor your page’s after your site launch to check for any crawling or indexation issues
Part Fourteen
In part fourteen I will cover some of the final preparations that need to be made before a new website goes live whilst also recapping the steps taken so far to reach this point. Click here to go to part fourteen.
