Marketing Defined

The inclusion of a Site Map is crucial to SEO so the Search Engine spiders can easily crawl through the pages of your site.

Whilst the more sophisticated Blog scripts allow easy categorization and search of the various Posts in a Blog, unfortunately Blogger’s standard templates only allow you to display a few of your most recent Posts.

The recent Page Rank update at Google got me thinking, and to allow Googlebot and the other search engine spiders to easily crawl my Blogger based blog, I have included a Site Map to the Marketing Defined Blog containing a chronological text listing of each and every Post.

If you use Blogger and have not bothered to transfer the hosting to your own website via FTP, it is highly recommend you publish a Site Map on your Blog.

Hosting your Blog on your own website, instead of Google’s Blogspot, is invaluable as far as SEO is concerned, and the addition of a Site Map regardless of where your Blogger blog is hosted will give the search engine spiders an easy path to a logcial crawl and fast indexing of your Blog.

If you don’t have a technical or website design background, including a Site Map of all your posts, is as simple as publishing a new post or page on your Blog showing all the URL’s to your Posts in chronological order. Naturally, each time your Blog is updated, you will have to do a simple “edit” and “re-publish” of the Post containing the Site Map to reflect any new additions.

[I personally chose to do this via my beloved web design editor: Dreamweaver, simply updating the source code directly within the applicable web page in my Dreamweaver software.]

I also chose to include a hyperlink to your Site Map in the sidebar of your Blog, as close to the top as possible.

NOTE: The home page of this Blog when it was new got an initial Page Rank of 3,  but some of the actual Posts within have got a PR5 simply because the use of Technorati Tags have brought these Posts to a Top10 ranking at Google, with the added bonus of having those Posts included in high profile Blogs.

It is worth noting that a lot of high profile Blogs, actively use Technorati Tags to search for and locate content to include in their highly ranked Blogs.

Congratulations to all mates and readers who have experienced the buzz of their very first Page Rank from Google, and in particular to Darren Rowse of ProBlogger who was instrumental in a PR5 for one of my Increase Website Traffic Tips articles, highlighted in his popular Living Room Blog.

Please leave comments at the foot of this post as to how your Blog survived Google’s recent page rank update … and if a Site Map has made any difference to your Blogger based blog.