Whatever platform you’re using—Drupal, Joomla, WordPress, etc.—it’s vital to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to generate a sitemap and regularly submit it to Google, Bing, and Yahoo!  A sitemap serves as a sort of table of contents for your website.  This table of contents can be submitted to search engines so that each page of your website and their relationship to each other is clearly comprehensible.

Without a sitemap, chances are that search engines don’t know about all the content on your site and don’t see as rapidly as they might otherwise.

This was the case with Mercatus.org until the Mercatus Center launched its new website in late November.  Up until that point, Mercatus had been using a .NET-based CMS called Ektron, which didn’t generate XML sitemaps. During the roughly one year that Mercatus used this CMS, Google indexed roughly 100 pages a day out of the more than 2,500 that make up Mercatus.org.  Even if Google looked at different pages every day, it would take them 25 days to index the entire site at that rate—meaning that few topical, current pieces were ever searchable.

In late November the Mercatus Center launched its new website, a Drupal 6 installation including an XML Sitemap module.  For the first few days after launch, Google only indexed a dozen pages a day.  However, once a handful of days had past, our crawl rate skyrocketed, as evidenced by this graph from Google Webmaster Tools:

You can see that the number of pages crawled (indexed) each day now ranges between 3,000 and 7,200 7,800 (updated 12/22).  This means that the entire site is cataloged by Google at least once a day.  All of this new attention has more than doubled the amount of traffic Mercatus.org gets from Google.

If you’re using a platform that doesn’t support sitemap generation and submission it’s a pretty good indication that the platform you’re using isn’t a good one.  This is such a basic component of building a modern website that it is worth changing platforms in order to have this capability.  ReadyMadeWeb recommends reading the annual Open Source CMS Market Share report by Ric Shreves of Water & Stone to familiarize yourself with the market for modern, standards-based CMS solutions if you’re considering a switch.

The methods for generating and submitting sitemaps vary depending on the CMS you’re using.  ReadyMadeWeb will soon be posting how-to guides on Drupal and WordPress XML sitemaps.

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