Having a Google Sitemap for a site is a must if Search Engine Optimization is one of our priorities. Since Google dominates the search engine industry, it is important for us, as Webmasters, to understand how Google see our sites. It is quite surprised that a majority of site owners do not take advantage of this yet.
The first thing Sitemap account tells us is when did the Google bots visited our sites. Upon logging into the account, the last crawl date by the bots will be shown in the front page. This allow us to check if our latest content is indexed by the bots. We should always check this date because when Google bans a site, the bots will still be visiting the site but never index it. Hence, further rectification will need to be done and a re-inclusion request has to be followed google index download.
Another useful information provided is the Query Statistics. This page will show us the top searches relating to our pages and if we have received any traffic from these keywords. As Google updates this page regularly, Webmasters can monitor their sites ranking easily from here especially after Google's data refresh.
The next section, Page Analysis, is the only place on the Internet that illustrates how Google sees our sites. This section shows us a list of keywords that are closely related to our pages in Google's' perspective. From the data here, we can easily fine tune our internal linking structure or propose new external anchor word(s) to meet our target.
The latest addition to Google Sitemap account is the Links Statistics. This set of data will show us how many incoming links do we have from both external and internal pages. As the linking statistics here is far more updated than the traditional link: operator, this feature is well-liked by many Webmasters recently.
To conclude, Google Sitemap account is certainly very useful to the Webmasters as it provides us with a lot of information from Google's perspective. By utilizing this account, most web masters should not have a problem in boosting their SERP (Search Engine Result page).
