Things have been busy at ThriveSmart HQ the last couple of weeks. Yesterday we unveiled event publication and distribution, and today an update to help Sprout websites rank higher in search results! With today's upgrade all Sprout! websites receive site map files and updated URLs to improve search engine results.
A site map file informs search engines about URLs on a website that are available for crawling[1]. The site map allows us to not only inform search engines of the existence of pages but also to rank the importance of each page within the site. As you add or remove pages to your Sprout! hosted website your site map changes automatically!
The changed URLs are for products, services, people and events pages. The new URL includes information about what the URL points to right in the address. For example if you were to look at the URL for a page yesterday you would see something like: people/3 today that becomes: people/3-daniel-oshea. Including the name in the URL is not only a search engine optimization technique but also makes the link more readable. The URLs for events, products, and services all include similar information. If you have bookmarks using the old style URL they will still work with the new URLs!
We also unleashed two other changes tonight that are unrelated to search results. Sprout! has a new theme for comedians (from the Colors & Settings menu select Colors & Icons and scroll down to Comedian). We also changed the timezone picker on the contact us and events pages to use Pacific, Eastern, Mountain style names.
Thanks to everyone who has provided us feedback so far! We love hearing from people who are using Sprout! for their business website.
Notes:
- For more information on site map files see http://www.sitemaps.org/