Opportunity For Software Developers To Quickly Get Noticed By Search Engines
When you are just starting out, getting picked up by search engines is not always so easy. Last year Google announced a sitemaps program where web site owners could submit a list of web pages, as well information about each page, to Google, which can help them index your web pages. It didn’t guarantee a listing in Google, but it could help a lot.
Over the last year they have been adding new features that give web developers more information about how their web site is represented in Google, including statistics on commonly searched terms related to the web site and any errors the Google spider encounters while crawling your site.
TechCrunch posted that yesterday, Yahoo and Microsoft announced that they will be supporting the sitemaps protocol and any other search engine can choose to support it as well. This is really good news for microISVs who have been trying to get noticed by these three search engines. My experience has shown that adding a sitemap is very beneficial and really easy to do. There is no reason why you should not have one.
I think as time goes on, the sitemaps program will be expanded with new features and more opportunities for web site owners to let search engines know about the content on their web site.
More information on Google’s web master program which includes Google Sitemaps can be found here. You can also find additional information about the sitemaps protocol at sitemaps.org.
As the developer of a sitemaps generator, if you are a Mac user and want to make a sitemap for your web site you can download RAGE Google Sitemap Automator. If you are currently a member of TryBeta, just send me an email and I will send you a free license until the end of the week.
November 28th, 2006 at 12:24 pm
I think you’re right - but what if you a Windows developer? Any sitemap recommendations?
November 28th, 2006 at 2:34 pm
There are many to choose from. I just recently installed a wordpress plug-in that creates one automatically for this blog. If you use wordpress you can get it at;
WordPress Google Sitemaps Tool
As for a windows downloadable app, CoffeeCup develops a good one.
Look for one that lets you automatically strip sessionids if you use PHP and cookies because you can not include them in your sitemap file. Most sitemap creation tools will not strip them, especially the free online ones.