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This is the second part of a series where I will be discussing startup SEO tips. In Part 1 you can find five tips on, analytics, title tag, keywords, meta descriptions and valid XHTML compliance. These tips are aimed for people and businesses with a startup SEO campaign and not intended for the company that requires hardcore exposure on the web. Browse to our website at http://www.opencircle.co.za if you require a more tailor made SEO solution.

Index:

* Part 1
* Part 2
* Part 3
* Part 4
* Part 5

Part 2

In the second part I will be discussing HTML Sitemaps and XML Sitemaps.

1. HTML Sitemaps
Sitemaps are exactly as the word describes Site-Map. It consist of a page where you have all the pages on your website listed as links. If you have a website with hundreds of pages, users can quickly jump to a page via your sitemap. These sitemaps are called HTML sitemaps. To view an example of a HTML sitemap click here. You will noticed that all the pages on that website is listed on the sitemap.

HTML sitemaps are intended for users. I will repeat that “HTML sitemaps are intended for users”. Most of the times it is difficult for search engine bots to crawl your HTML sitemap as it contains lots of jibber jabber (funny html tags, text on images, etc).

Google and Yahoo came up with a plan to create a sitemap which they both can read by writing an additional Sitemap in the programming language called XML. These Sitemaps are known as XML Sitemaps.

2. XML Sitemaps
Search engine search bots can easily crawl your XML Sitemap as it is written by using the Sitemap Protocol. To view an example of a XML Sitemap click here. XML Sitemaps are not intended for users and it is a simple way for search engine bots to crawl your website as it is written in a language that they understand.

For dynamic websites (a CMS system, Blog, E-commerce site, etc) this is a great feature as you can create a script to create a dynamic XML sitemap everytime you add a new page. This way you can be sure that the search engines will find your new content fast.

You might be wondering “How will the search engines ever know about my XML Sitemap?”. I will discuss this in great detail in Part 3 where you can submit your XML Sitemap and you can view how many pages are indexed via the Sitemap.

Watch this space for Part 3, where I will be discussing a few tools where you can submit your XML Sitemap to the search engines.