Archive for the 'Sitemaps' Category

I was asked a question regarding using a Google API vs Google Sitemaps.

Is it better to get webpages indexed by using the Google API or Google Sitemaps?

So, let’s define what an API is, and how it is typically used. Wikipedia says an API is “An application programming interface (API) is a source code interface that a computer system or program library provides to support requests for services to be made of it by a computer program.”

The Google API can be used to build a web utility that performs various functions of the Google search engine (site query, related links, number of results per query, keyword ranking reports, etc.). There are already web utilities built and free to use. All you need to do is sign up for a free Google API key, then enter your API key into the program to run a query.

Ready for the surprise? Google Sitemaps is using the Google API to index your website.

To start using Google Sitemaps you need to generate an XML Sitemap. The Google Sitemap Gen is a python script open-source project that can generate the xml sitemap for you. Or, you can use any of the Sitemaps Third Party Programs .

Steps to getting your site indexed:
1) Setup a Sitemap, and place it on your server.
2) Then, submit the URL of your XML Sitemap to each search engine.
3) Work on the link structure of your website. Eg: link to the category sections of the site and then from there place links to sub-category and product pages.
4) Get quality related deep linking inbound links to your website.

This is especially important for very large websites. The goal is to get more pages indexed. The more pages indexed, the more organic traffic. Simple as that.

Here are the steps:

1) Create a XML sitemap using the sitemap protocol ( it’s as easy as plugging your URL into a free sitemap generator tool ).
2) Then, place the Sitemap on your server.
3) Then, submit the URL of your XML Sitemap to each search engine.

It’s as easy as that.
Use the crawl data to fix any broken pages, and analyze / optimize your site.