If You Haven’t Already, Make Sure to Add a KML Sitemap

KML sitemaps, which stands for Keyhole Markup Language, associates latitude and longitude to a website as well as more geo-specific information for applications like Google Earth, Flickr and Google Maps.

The image below is a proposed plan for the 2012 olympics in Vancouver, using KML sitemaps and a KMZ image for where Olympic venues could go (more on that can be found here).

These features can also be viewed on many mobile devices as long as certain guidelines are followed. Google says:

“Google Geo Sitemaps is an extension of the Sitemap protocol that enables you to publish geospatial content (geo content) to Google, in order to make it searchable in Google Earth and on Google Maps.”

Using a geo-sitemap file will make it easier for Google to index your Business Listing and place it in the Google Maps search engine.

In many cases it will also add an extra link in organic search engine results that says something similar to, “Show map of xxxx address.”

According to Google, “Here are a few tips for creating KML content that provides useful search results:

• Give your <Document> a meaningful <name>.
• Provide a relevant <description> for each <Placemark> so that the user can see the context of the search result.
• If you have a lot of data, divide it into topic-specific layers.
• Give each <Feature> an “id” so that the search result can link directly to it.

Similarly, you can create GeoRSS feeds with the Atom namespace and include the same Atom elements for attribution. (See http://georss.org/atom.) This example shows use of <link>, href, <author>, and <name>, which are all used by Google Search for RSS feeds with geolocated data.”

Considering the weight Google is placing on KML sitemaps, they should be part of a local strategy to improve search results.

Tagged as: atom, flickr, geo-sitemap, GeoRSS, Google, Google Earth, Google Maps, Keyhole Markup Language, KML, KML Sitemap, KMZ, KMZ image, search engine, Sitemaps