Using sitemap tool to get Google to index all your fundraising content
Howard Lake | 20 July 2005 | News
While Google will drive a good proportion of visitors to your fundraising web pages, there are plenty of ways of helping the search engine index more of your pages. The latest edition of Dr. Ralph Wilson’s Web Marketing Today gives details of how to do this using Google sitemaps.
Dr Wilson’s Web Marketing Today is a free weekly email newsletter that has been running for 10 years, and even now it can still deliver some new and valuable advice on the subject.
This week’s issue encourages website owners to use Google Sitemap, “a system of submitting an XML-based sitemap directly to Google that will help their spider robot more easily index larger sites”. In other words, you can help Google index all the pages on your site by providing it with a list of these pages in a format it can handle.
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In addition, the sitemap format will also help Google’s indexing system understand which pages are updated most often.
Wilson lists a number of software tools that can deliver the sitemap, some for smaller sites and some for larger. Several of them are available at no charge, although will require some website manager experience.
Google Sitemaps is still in beta testing, so is not yet a fully fledged service, but UK Fundraising will be establishing an appropriate tool and adding this facility to its site in due course.
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.