hi I’m Evan Carmichael welcome to
another edition of ask Evan in today’s
episode I’m going to answer questions
from one on reader Stan and also share
one of the tools that I use to run a
business that I really like so it’s a
two-for-one deal here today so stands
question is about sitemaps so he was
saying that a third party recently told
him that his website records could be
hurt if he doesn’t have a sitemap and he
says he couldn’t find a site map on Evan
Carmichael calm and if I can give them
some advice so Stan signups are really
important the reason why they’re
important is to show the search engines
all of the pages that exist on your site
so what Google will do as an example is
they’ll come to your home page and then
start digging into your site by crawling
the links so the more you link to your
deeper pages the more they’re going to
be able to find those pages and get them
indexed into their search engine if you
don’t do a good job by linking them then
you could have pages that sit on your
site but Google never knows about them
so in that case if Google doesn’t know
about them they’re not going to build a
rank them for you so the sitemap is a
way to show Google and the other search
engines all the different pages that you
have on your site so we spend a lot of
time with our google sitemaps in
particular and i’ll just show you a
quick example so if i go to my homepage
i have a link here that says google
sitemap so come on here a lot and I’ll
show you what I do with my sitemap just
to kind of give you a sense so we have
number of different site maps and we
have some sub domains that we’re testing
out for our site Maps always wanting
different tests on the site but my main
one here is for Evan Carmichael calm
this is my google webmaster tools and
everybody can have a webmaster tools
account if you click on site
configuration you’ll be able to go to
site maps and this will show you the
different site maps that Google
recognizes so we have you know nine
sitemaps plus our main in the article
sitemap and a blog site map and if you
click in on either of these it’ll show
you kind of a detailed list of every
page that we’ve indexed so we use a tool
that we’ll talk about later to create
the site map but once you create the
site map you submit it to Google you
basically just
go here submit a sitemap and you add in
a URL so I’m Carl calm this would be
your website com / whatever and put your
site map in you should send XML type of
feed so that’s why I see it here and
what’s really beneficial is you can see
if there’s any problems with your
sitemap so here there’s there’s been a
problem with the sitemaps we have 11
pages submitted 9 our index and there’s
some issue so we need to look at that
and see what see what’s going on if we
look at our main articles we can see we
have almost 60,000 that have been
contributed to the site map and almost
all of them are indexed so it shows that
the content is being picked up and is
being indexed by Google what you can do
if you don’t have as much content i
don’t expect most people to have you
know a hundred thousand pages of content
on their site what it can do is show you
which pages are being indexed and which
ones aren’t which is really important so
if you know that you’re submitting pages
to google and they’re not recognizing
those pages are not in the index maybe
there’s something wrong with those pages
that you can fix up and resubmit so that
they will be indexed these other site
maps are other files that we have on the
side that could have pictures into them
or forum posts or other things that they
may not always get picked up so we don’t
really care too much about these ones
but I pay a lot of attention to this you
know if only half of articles are being
indexed and that would be a major
problem then we’d have to look at how we
can fix those up so that’s that’s what’s
useful about the sitemaps it helps the
search engines know which articles are
on your site and it helps you figure out
which articles are being indexed in
which ones aren’t and if there’s any
problems they’ll let you know so that’s
a great way to do it now to create a
site map it can be super easy you don’t
need to have a lot of technical
experience to do it so what I use if I
go to my favorite tools here this is a
page i use to showcase all the tools
that are used to run my business i use a
free tool free is always a magic word
for business owners it’s called g site
crawler Angie site crawler is a free
download that it’s a as a pc software
you download onto your computer you put
in your URL and basically what it will
do is crawl your website like Google so
they’ll start on your homepage and then
start going to all the sub pages and
then
create a site map for you so to create
that site map it has to be in a specific
language that the search engines
understand and if you’re not a very
technical person it can be a little
overwhelming to try to create that so
what we’ll do is use G site crawler will
do this once a month for for our site
because we have a lot of ongoing stuff
that’s happening with our business if
you don’t have a lot of changes and you
don’t need to do it as frequently but
this program does too cool thing is one
it creates a sitemap and will
automatically you know generate that
file which all you have to do is upload
to your website and then go back to
google and click submit a sitemap and
put in the URL the other really cool
thing about it is it will tell you if
there’s any errors with your website so
let’s hope there’s any crawl errors so
you might be linking to a page it
doesn’t exist anymore because you’ve
updated it or you change your template
or you’re trying to pull in a picture
that doesn’t exist it tells you what
those errors are and gives you a big
list it tells you where the arrows are
generated from and what you need to do
to fix it so that’s great to either do
yourself or give to your technical guy
to be able to go in and make those site
changes because the more those kind of
broken links you have or broken images
somewhere on your website the more of
those you have the worst looks or Google
and you could potentially have a penalty
hit on your site usually those types of
errors are not on your homepage you’re
very deep on some old page that you
haven’t updated for years but if you
have enough of them that could look bad
in the search engines eyes so you
definitely want to fix those up and
again g sy crawler does that for you and
it’s completely free so Stan I hope that
helps answer your question if you guys
liked the video please give the video a
thumbs up below i always appreciate
seeing those you know those thumbs ups
coming in and if you have any comments
so if you’re using a different program
i’d love to hear from you if you want to
leave a comment under the video and I’ll
always do my best to respond to you or
maybe even make a video reply so thank
you and we’ll see you on the next
episode
I
you
another edition of ask Evan in today’s
episode I’m going to answer questions
from one on reader Stan and also share
one of the tools that I use to run a
business that I really like so it’s a
two-for-one deal here today so stands
question is about sitemaps so he was
saying that a third party recently told
him that his website records could be
hurt if he doesn’t have a sitemap and he
says he couldn’t find a site map on Evan
Carmichael calm and if I can give them
some advice so Stan signups are really
important the reason why they’re
important is to show the search engines
all of the pages that exist on your site
so what Google will do as an example is
they’ll come to your home page and then
start digging into your site by crawling
the links so the more you link to your
deeper pages the more they’re going to
be able to find those pages and get them
indexed into their search engine if you
don’t do a good job by linking them then
you could have pages that sit on your
site but Google never knows about them
so in that case if Google doesn’t know
about them they’re not going to build a
rank them for you so the sitemap is a
way to show Google and the other search
engines all the different pages that you
have on your site so we spend a lot of
time with our google sitemaps in
particular and i’ll just show you a
quick example so if i go to my homepage
i have a link here that says google
sitemap so come on here a lot and I’ll
show you what I do with my sitemap just
to kind of give you a sense so we have
number of different site maps and we
have some sub domains that we’re testing
out for our site Maps always wanting
different tests on the site but my main
one here is for Evan Carmichael calm
this is my google webmaster tools and
everybody can have a webmaster tools
account if you click on site
configuration you’ll be able to go to
site maps and this will show you the
different site maps that Google
recognizes so we have you know nine
sitemaps plus our main in the article
sitemap and a blog site map and if you
click in on either of these it’ll show
you kind of a detailed list of every
page that we’ve indexed so we use a tool
that we’ll talk about later to create
the site map but once you create the
site map you submit it to Google you
basically just
go here submit a sitemap and you add in
a URL so I’m Carl calm this would be
your website com / whatever and put your
site map in you should send XML type of
feed so that’s why I see it here and
what’s really beneficial is you can see
if there’s any problems with your
sitemap so here there’s there’s been a
problem with the sitemaps we have 11
pages submitted 9 our index and there’s
some issue so we need to look at that
and see what see what’s going on if we
look at our main articles we can see we
have almost 60,000 that have been
contributed to the site map and almost
all of them are indexed so it shows that
the content is being picked up and is
being indexed by Google what you can do
if you don’t have as much content i
don’t expect most people to have you
know a hundred thousand pages of content
on their site what it can do is show you
which pages are being indexed and which
ones aren’t which is really important so
if you know that you’re submitting pages
to google and they’re not recognizing
those pages are not in the index maybe
there’s something wrong with those pages
that you can fix up and resubmit so that
they will be indexed these other site
maps are other files that we have on the
side that could have pictures into them
or forum posts or other things that they
may not always get picked up so we don’t
really care too much about these ones
but I pay a lot of attention to this you
know if only half of articles are being
indexed and that would be a major
problem then we’d have to look at how we
can fix those up so that’s that’s what’s
useful about the sitemaps it helps the
search engines know which articles are
on your site and it helps you figure out
which articles are being indexed in
which ones aren’t and if there’s any
problems they’ll let you know so that’s
a great way to do it now to create a
site map it can be super easy you don’t
need to have a lot of technical
experience to do it so what I use if I
go to my favorite tools here this is a
page i use to showcase all the tools
that are used to run my business i use a
free tool free is always a magic word
for business owners it’s called g site
crawler Angie site crawler is a free
download that it’s a as a pc software
you download onto your computer you put
in your URL and basically what it will
do is crawl your website like Google so
they’ll start on your homepage and then
start going to all the sub pages and
then
create a site map for you so to create
that site map it has to be in a specific
language that the search engines
understand and if you’re not a very
technical person it can be a little
overwhelming to try to create that so
what we’ll do is use G site crawler will
do this once a month for for our site
because we have a lot of ongoing stuff
that’s happening with our business if
you don’t have a lot of changes and you
don’t need to do it as frequently but
this program does too cool thing is one
it creates a sitemap and will
automatically you know generate that
file which all you have to do is upload
to your website and then go back to
google and click submit a sitemap and
put in the URL the other really cool
thing about it is it will tell you if
there’s any errors with your website so
let’s hope there’s any crawl errors so
you might be linking to a page it
doesn’t exist anymore because you’ve
updated it or you change your template
or you’re trying to pull in a picture
that doesn’t exist it tells you what
those errors are and gives you a big
list it tells you where the arrows are
generated from and what you need to do
to fix it so that’s great to either do
yourself or give to your technical guy
to be able to go in and make those site
changes because the more those kind of
broken links you have or broken images
somewhere on your website the more of
those you have the worst looks or Google
and you could potentially have a penalty
hit on your site usually those types of
errors are not on your homepage you’re
very deep on some old page that you
haven’t updated for years but if you
have enough of them that could look bad
in the search engines eyes so you
definitely want to fix those up and
again g sy crawler does that for you and
it’s completely free so Stan I hope that
helps answer your question if you guys
liked the video please give the video a
thumbs up below i always appreciate
seeing those you know those thumbs ups
coming in and if you have any comments
so if you’re using a different program
i’d love to hear from you if you want to
leave a comment under the video and I’ll
always do my best to respond to you or
maybe even make a video reply so thank
you and we’ll see you on the next
episode
I
you
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