Building a website and putting it up online is comparatively easier nowadays. However, deriving more people to the website and getting it indexed on popular search engines is a methodological task. One of the aids for getting webpages indexed is putting a sitemap on the website.

A sitemap is a web page which lists all the pages of a website in an organized manner, preferably showing navigation paths or hierarchy. These listed pages are basically web-links present on that website and help the users, webmasters and the search engines to index a website. Sitemap helps the users to navigate through the website and helps search engines to find all website links present. Building an ideal sitemap is a lot like building a perfect website. In other words, we can say that a sitemap is the pseudo-index for a website.

Though Sitemap helps the crawlers to find the web pages of a website, it does not guarantee indexing of a web site on search engines. Still, it does ensure that a search engine spider will more likely index the website properly instead of doing it partially.

When creating a sitemap, one should keep the following points in mind:

• A sitemap should be the simplest page of the website – it reflects the constituents.
• One should not give a complicated name to the sitemap link and keep it as “Sitemap”. This will help visitors to understand immediately what it means and is for.
• Avoid dynamic sitemaps; in which visitors have to work to detect information, because the visitors come to a sitemap for comfort and finding their way around the site.
• All pages linked to the sitemap should be organized. It may be a good idea to put a sentence describing the page contents below the link and keywords may also be included in the title attribute of the anchor tag.
• A sitemap link should be included with other links on the main menu on a website.
• All pages of a website should carry a sitemap link.

One can also use an XML Sitemap Generator tool to generate a perfect XML sitemap, which is for the Search Engine robots specifically (The one being talked about above is an HTML Sitemap – for the visitors and the search engines).

Sitemap plays an important role in Search Engine Optimization and also helps pages of a website to get indexed, to ultimately derive organic traffic. A Sitemap is a page on your website, indicating the whole structure of the website along with various sections (web pages) and links between the pages.

In short, we can say that Sitemap provides a detailed structure of the website, well explaining the inter-linking of the web pages. Sitemaps are very helpful as they make site navigation easy for the visitors and also help search engines to index most of the pages of the website.

We can generally categorize Sitemaps into two categories:

HTML Sitemap:
HTML Sitemap is primarily for human visitors. It helps them to know which all pages does the website contain, what sort of inter-linking is present in the website and where all can they go within the site.

XML Sitemap:
XML Sitemap is specifically for search engines. It tells the crawlers about all the web pages of the website, which one wants to get indexed in search engines. Mentioning the pages in an XML Sitemap is like helping the crawler, not to miss the pages you want the search engines to know.

Advantages of Sitemaps:

• Helps in Search Engine Indexing: Sitemaps help search engines to know about any change that you make on your site. It is not certain that the search engine bot will automatically index the updated pages, but the changes will surely be indexed much faster as compared to when there is no Sitemap for any website.
• It Makes Navigation Easier: A Sitemap helps the visitor to find out the information what he is looking for. It plays a role of a guide and makes navigation easy for the visitor so that, the visitor can easily find the desired/required information.
• Helps in Getting Traffic to a New Website: If you have a new website with very few links in it, Sitemaps can be very helpful. This is because the search engine spider crawls through documents by following links from one page to another and if your site does not contain proper links, it would be difficult for the bots to index them.
• Dynamic Content on Site: Sitemaps are very useful if you have a dynamic site where you update or change content frequently. The search engines can be informed of these changes through your Sitemap faster, thus keeping dynamic content also indexed at frequent intervals.

You may also use the XML Sitemap Generator and XML Sitemap Validator tools to generate and validate XML Sitemaps for your website automatically.

You all know that dynamic websites, for e.g. an e-commerce website, has multiple webpages that are generated dynamically based on the request/query passed. In such a case, it gets complicated to assimilate the webpages of the website – doesn’t it? There is just a right tool available at SiteOpSys to help you with this.

The URL Extractor facilitates retrieving the webpages of a websites in this kind of a situation or even otherwise. It extracts the URLs of the website for you in very little time. All one has to do is to enter the name of the website, for which URLs need to be extracted. One also has the option to limit the extraction of pages to a certain number of URLs.

In case of an SEO analysis too, this tools comes in handy as one can first extract the website pages and then analyze the extracted pages for various SEO factors through the other tools available. This greatly simplifies the process with reliable results. One can even run this to tool to check the number of webpages present in a website, for a website having up to a thousand pages.

Give this tool a shot and use it for your specific purpose of analysis/evaluation.

Website development and optimization involve many factors that need to be taken into account. A specific constituent like the directory depth has its own worth and is also structured carefully.

If one needs to evaluate the directory depth of an existing website one has to first know/extract all the webpages and then check each one of them for the directory depth. Or, if one needs to check the directory depth of another website, for which there is no access to the directory structure or all the URLs, things can get difficult.

The Directory Depth Checker allows you to perform this check in such a situation without a pre-condition of knowing the webpages or the directory structure. You just need to enter the domain for which the depth needs to be checked, it will automatically extract the number of specified pages (10 / 50 / 100 … 1000) and display the results of directory depth check for each of the extracted pages.

Truly helpful in reducing efforts and time! The analysis can be used for re-structuring or modifications. Or also just for research for finding out the trends. Some people feel that the directory depth should not be much, for making indexing by the search engine crawlers easier. Others feel crawlers do index inner directories well too and appropriate organization of directories and pages is more important. Thus each one can tweak the website to suit their specific need.

Evaluate websites with speed and ease to save your precious time.

XML Sitemap is a way for a webmaster to inform the search engine (SE) crawlers about the pages existing on the website, which it should crawl through. Or, we can say that it is an XML file that lists the URLs of the website along with supplementary metadata about them, which allows search engine crawlers to know about the pages of the website with related information.

Usually SE crawlers find the webpages from internal and external links of the website. XML Sitemap acts as an added source of information for the crawlers giving them a hint regarding all the pages of the websites. Even though an XML Sitemap does not guarantee indexing of the listed webpages on search engines, it does make the job easier for the crawlers.

The XML Validator at SiteOpSys, checks the XML Sitemaps of all the entered URLs for the SE crawlers, particularly Google, to make sure there are no problems and the crawlers can easily comprehend them. Ensuring error-free sitemaps is a good SEO practice and the chances of indexing of the pages on the search engines increase.

Check out this tool for validating several XML Sitemaps and ensure that the websites are equipped to direct the search engine crawlers accurately.

When working on the online platform, it is important to follow the norms of the web. Browsers and development technologies follow certain standards to help us view the webpages as they should be viewed. Just as they follow certain rules to present the layout effectively, the character encoding followed online should also be in parity with the standards being followed to ensure that the data transferred, is transferred and projected correctly.

Currently the preference being followed for webpage encoding is the UTF-8 (Unicode Transformation Format) Character Encoding. To ensure there are no compatibility problems with the latest browsers it is good to check if all the webpages are encoded in UTF-8. The Character Encoding Checker easily lets you check this, for up to a hundred URLs at one time.

One of the reasons why it has become a preferred encoding is also that UTF-8 is backwards compatible with ASCII. Thus the use of UTF-8 is also increasing for emails.

I recommend checking all the pages of your website for character encoding through this and alter the encoding, if required – if you want to stay up to date.

One may or may not bother much about the web page size, but the fact remains that it still needs to be considered from SEO as well as usability perspective. Even though with the upcoming high bandwidth internet connections people do visit heavy pages, still everyone prefers a webpage that is light and fast to load.

What adds to the size of the page? Well, it’s really a simple question with a simple answer – we all mostly know… The HTML, Images, CSS, other additional multimedia, etc. are the most common components. Even out of these, the ones that are primarily considered while looking at the page size are the text and the images.

If we know the Page Sizes, we could easily work on optimizing them for the users as well as the search engines. The Page Size Checker precisely allows you to check multiple URLs for their page text size, total images size and the combined total page size (text + images) along with details of the present images. Once, we know these details – working on the scope (adding or reducing) can easily be handled.

If one talks about usability, page size is one of the contributors of an optimized page. A visitor who has to wait long for the page to load would tend to bounce off the page and add to the page’s / website’s bounce rate. Even for the crawlers, it is said that the search engines do not completely cache a page that is heavy (in size) and hence tend to crawl less frequently.

Why overlook website’s search engine optimization and usability when they are important integral elements. I suggest one should not. Evaluate the website and create a perfect blend of SEO and page usability.

Many times we can’t access a particular URL because of some error in the response from the server. When we extend this to a complete website – like a self owned online business or checking the client’s website for the response returned from the server, a well developed tool would be very useful. Identifying the response code returned with the respective meaning could help us all in our analysis of a group of URLs.

Keeping this in mind, SiteOpSys developed an efficient and simple to use Server Header Response Checker that can check server responses for multiple URLs entered, simultaneously.  Knowing the response code returned can easily assist analyzing the issue and rectifying it.

This tool can be helpful in several ways. Let’s say for a business owner who wants to ensure that the newly developed website is functioning well with no issues in accessing any of the website’s pages. On the other hand, one could check the established links to the website for ensuring all URLs do not return server related error when accessed. One could also use the tool to find out the implemented redirects or whether the URL being accessed is permanently moved.

I love this tool for its speed and usefulness – hope you enjoy using it too. Give it a try and share your views…