Multiple XML Sitemaps: Get Your Deepest Pages Indexed

One of the biggest mistakes I see when visitng certain web sites online is the lack of deep page rank. I've also had many people ask me how to get their pages that are past the spider page crawl limit how to get those pages more traffic and better page rank. I must say when people first started asking me this about three years ago, I waas a little stumped myself. As time passed, it stayed int he back of my head as to how to accomplish this awesome task. I mean, you can create back links to the page and even interlink the pages to other pages on the web site that recieve crawls by the search engine spiders. Bit it wasn't enough for me personally. Then, just this year, that answer was given to me and was sitting right in fron to my face!

XML SITEMAPS!!!!!!

Yes, XML Sitemaps. i know many of you are familiar with these, but for those who aren't, I'll explain what they are.

XML Sitemaps are XML files that are created to feed the url's to your web site(s) to the major search engines. Google, YaHoo, and Bing provide your with Webmaster areas to submit your sitemaps to.

The great part about XML sitemaps is that they allow you to bring immediate attention to your web site(s) url's from the major search engines. This is a new way of submitting your web site to the search engines unlike the earlier days when you could just submit the home page of your web site. Now you can submit as many url's tot he search engines as your web site(s) has.

While working at an Internet Service provider here in Las Vegas, a fellow SEO leaned over and asked me, "Hey, Alex, can a web site have multiple xml sitemaps"? I told him of course. That's how people have both regualr XML Sitemaps and XML Sitemaps for the images on their web site. Then he answers, "No, I mean for the different sections of the directory that doesn't seem to get traffic". I replied "HELL YES"!! It clicked in my head right then and their! I explained to him by creating the different XML Sitemaps for the different categories in the company's online city directory, it would give much better attention to the url's located in those categories that were not crawled because the spiders did not search that deep. This will help to give the categories url's and the url's under those categories more attention by the search engines and help to increase traffic to those parts of the directory and at the same time increasing the directories search engines presence. We got the project approved and done. About two weeks after we submitted the different XML Sitemaps to the major search engines, the directories traffic increased by over 1,500+ visitors and continued to rise from their! By the time I resigned from the company, the online directory recieved an average of 2,500+ visitors a day!

It was awesome! It was the answer that I was looking for to couple with backlinking and interlinking. We broke the XML Sitemaps down into the different categories we wanted to increase traffic to. For example, their is a section on the directory called "Weddings". Under this category, you will find other sub categories that are related to wedding days and ceramonies. What we did first was optimized the main category page. We would then include the main catergory and included the url's in the page, minus the profile page url's, in an XML Sitemap. Then we took the url's under the sub-categories and created XML Sitemaps for those as well. By doing this, we've increased the priority of the pages so the search engines spiders would give them top attention aside from the overall directory. We then submitted them to the major search engines and waited for the magic to happen.

I used That company's online directory as an example to show you proff of the success of this technique, but this can be applied to web sites that just have different pages under different categories as well. This is a great way to increase your sites SERP presence by including many more of your pages in the search engines with page rank. try it out and watch the traffic to your web site increase!