Thursday, June 21, 2007

New features in Google Sitemaps

The Google Sitemap program has brought a high level of assistance to web developers, web designers and business owners who want to optimize how their website’s web pages are seen by the Google search engine. We all know how important page ranking is for a web page. The higher your page rank in Google, the more chances that it will be clicked and visited by visitors. Increased internet traffic is what drives sales and awareness for products and services.

The Google Sitemap program has become very popular because it made the task of submitting web pages to Google so much easier. A web developer or designer does not even have to worry about making frequent changes to the web pages because it is more easily known by Google. By presenting a constantly fresh index of web pages for your web site you are assured that what is presented in Google is the latest pages that you are maintaining.

The very high popularity of Google Sitemap has encouraged Google’s team of engineers to develop and add more features to the program. These additions seek to make Google Sitemaps more intuitive and effective in its functions.

Google recently announced that it has again added a bevy of new features for the Google Sitemap program that just made certain aspects of the program so much easier to understand and maintain.

Here are the latest new features of the Google Sitemap program:

Query Stats. Knowing the top position of your website is important. With Google’s Query Stats, you will now know the top search queries where the results included your website as well as those that Google searchers actually clicked on. The position given is the average statistic posted over the last three weeks.

Top mobile search queries. Google acknowledges that there is a growing number of people who use mobile devices for browsing the internet and also consider it as a separate “demographic”. For this reason, the top mobile search queries feature shows web designers and developers the top search queries made from mobile devices in which the results showed their website. Web designers and web developers will see both the mobile searches of all web sites as well as the mobile searches of mobile-specific web sites. The results given by this feature will only appear if it is available in your web site. At this point of the development of this feature, Google only shows the top search queries and not the clicks made for those queries.

Downloading Sitemap details, statistics, and errors. Your Sitemap account now also contain additional information. You can now download information in the form of a comma separated value file. This type of file can be opened by using any text editor or spreadsheet program. You can decide to download the information on a per table basis, or you can opt to download Sitemap details, errors or statistics for all of the web sites in your Google Sitemaps account in one convenient file.

Philip Nicosia is the webmaster of XML-Sitemaps.com which provides a free site map generator which produces sitemaps in XML format for Google together with Yahoo site maps and HTML sitemaps for human visitors.

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