Making Your Site Search Engine Friendly with EZ-SITEMAP

Introduction
EZSitemap is a tool included with all EZ-NetTools accounts that helps the major search engines index your web site more efficiently and accurately.  It does this by creating a “site map.”  The objective of this course is to teach you how to create a “site map” for the major search engines to use.  

There are two common definitions of “site maps.” depending on the intended audience.  The older and more familiar definition is a web page that is similar to a table of contents or an index of all of the pages on your web site.   Such a page is intended for your visitor to use to look up the information he is looking for.  While this type of “site map” may be appropriate for your web site, this course is NOT about that kind of “site map.”

Another and more recent definition of a site map is a file that search engine “bots”,  “spiders”, or “crawlers”  can read.   “Bots”, “spiders”, and “crawlers” are automated programs, sent by search engines, to scan web sites looking for information to index.  They read the words on your page (they cannot read the words that are part of a graphic), read the meta tags, and alt text tags.  Prior to site maps, these bots had to discover the pages on your web site by following the links on your pages.  With a site map, you can tell the bots directly what pages you want them to search.  You can also tell them information about those pages, such as which pages you think are more important.  This course is about this kind of site map.

Note: you may find it useful to open two browsers as you read this course, one opened to EZ-NetU and a second to view your web site.  You can do that by clicking on the “File” link on the top of your browser window and selecting “new window.”
Section 2 - Why Site Maps are Important, A Brief History and Description
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