The first thing we do for our Search Engine Optimisation clients is set them up with a Google Sitemap, which is a little file that contains a list of all the pages on your web site. Google then checks this file and looks to see which ones you consider to be the most important and when you updated them last. It then uses this information to go off and look at your web site and put the correct pages from your web site in it’s search results. It’s a great idea and gives some quick wins without a huge amount of server configuration, and of course if you’re clever you can use the list of pages to give your users a site map too. If you’re really intrigued this is what a sitemap file looks like!
It had led us to neglect the other big search engines a little because Yahoo and Msn didn’t have a similar method, but not now! What makes this particularly news-worthy is the fact that Yahoo and Msn didn’t go off and write their own system but instead have chosen to adopt Google’s! Of course they added a a few updates to the system but now it is possible to let all the major search engines know which pages you have on your web site. The new collaboration is at www.sitemaps.org - it doesn’t look that great but it’s a very powerful system.
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