It’s easy to understand that after all the time, effort and expense of designing a website, you certainly want Google to stand up and take notice. However, Google isn’t going to just index and crawl all of your pages unless you do the right things, at least not fast enough. This is important because the foundation of a website’s search engine friendliness begins with the set of steps and techniques we call on-site optimization. On-site optimization is that portion of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) that properly tells the Google Spiders everything they need to know about your website to understand what the website is all about and how each of the pages within the site relate to each other.
Generally speaking, as long as you have textual page content and you stay away from designing the site completely in Flash, you have a page that is “Google-crawlable.” However, it is the sitemap that is critical for the Google Spiders as the sitemap contains the information needed to index all of the pages and the interrelationship of the pages.
You can submit your sitemap to Google manually. Don’t wait for Google to come and crawl your site; this can only delay the indexing process until Google realizes you exist. Submitting your sitemap to Google immediately alerts Google to your existence and essentially you go into the queue for Google indexing.
However, it is best to use a dynamic site map. A dynamic site map automatically submits a new, updated sitemap to Google every time any content is added to the site or is modified in any way. This is very important because if you are serious about SEO and getting high ranks, you are going to add new content all of the time. With a dynamic sitemap, you don’t need to remember whether or not you submitted the sitemap or not.
The methods and tools that can provide guidance can all be found on the Google Webmaster Tools which not only provide detailed information on sitemaps, dynamic site maps and how they must be submitted but also provide additional tools in case there are errors found by the spiders when crawling your site.
While Google loves textual content, you can also include the videos, photos, podcasts and other non-textual content … just be sure to add descriptions to all non-textual content so that the crawlers can understand the relevance of the content.
Getting your site crawled is important. Getting your site crawled more often is more important. That is why it’s important to have fresh, non-duplicate content added to the site on a very regular basis. In essence you really can’t begin to get great Backlinks unless you are always adding great content and submitting the resulting updated sitemap to Google. It’s the foundation of all quality Link Building strategies.
Working with search engines is a discipline that some people spend years learning. You should always make sure that you understand what you are doing, or you may risk wasting your valuable time, and lost business trying to optimize a site incorrectly.
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