Ask Joanne's eNews

There are two main kinds of sitemaps, on-site sitemaps meant for your visitors and behind-the-scenes sitemaps (like the one Google introduced not long ago) meant for search engines.

Let's start with the "on-site" sitemaps. These are maps of a website's structure with links to all primary areas of the site.

Sitemaps are a great tool for increasing the usability of your website. While it may be perfectly clear to you how to find information on your site, it might not be clear to your visitors.

Give visitors a sitemap so they can find what they're looking for. Put the link to the sitemap in the upper right hand corner of every page (also a great place for an on-site search box).

Google sitemaps, on the other hand, are maps meant for the search crawlers, to help them index the pages on your website .

The more completely a search engine can "crawl" the links on your site, the more of your site information will be in the search engine's index - and that's a good thing.

This summer I slogged my way through creating a sitemap of my website for Google. Just this month I discovered how helpful this type of sitemap can be!

Because of the information in my sitemap, Google did a more complete indexing of my website and pointed out errors encountered at my site. So, not only has Google indexed more pages of my website - which can mean better search engine rankings for niche words and phrases - but also pointed out to me where I need to fix errors.

For me, creating a sitemap for Google was a very technical, tricky task. But for my brilliant business partner and husband, John, it was a piece of cake. So I am proud to announce that AskJoanne, LLC will be offering Google Sitemap Creation services for our clients. Please contact us today for details and pricing.

Google also just introduced a cool new tool for checking the status of your website in their index - try it here: https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/sitestatus