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Many websites have a sitemap page. As the name implies, this page contains a list of all of the other pages within the site with hyperlinks to these pages. It is a great aid for anyone looking for a specific page. Search engines such as Google and Yahoo also recognize these pages. While HTML sitemaps do help a bit with search engine results, a much more direct method of informing a search engine of all of the pages within your website is to use an XML sitemap.
Besides containing the URLs of the pages of your website, the XML sitemap can contain information regarding how frequently each page is updated, when each page was last modified, and even allows pages to be ranked in terms of importance to one another. The XML sitemap is becoming an industry standard; the Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and even Ask search engines all use them. The best part of all is that creating a sitemap is both easy and free, provided your website contains less than 501 pages.
Creating the Sitemap
To create a sitemap for your website, go to the XML-Sitemaps.com website, fill out the form (this takes less than 30 seconds) and click start. The XML Sitemap website will then “crawl” over your website and in a few minutes it will generate a sitemap that you can download. The sitemap can be immediately be uploaded to your website, or you can choose to edit it if, say for instance, you want to change the ranking of some of your webpages.
Editing the Sitemap
Editing the sitemap requires knowledge of how the XML file is structured. Open the sitemap file in a text editor. Your screen should look much like this:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<urlset xmlns=http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9 xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9 http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd">
<!--created with Free Online Sitemap Generator www.xml-sitemaps.com-->
<url>
<loc>http://www.mysite.com/</loc>
<priority>1.00</priority>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.mysite.com/aboutus.html</loc>
<priority>0.80</priority>
<lastmod>2009-03-20T16:31:51+00:00</lastmod>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
</url>
Each section of code between the <url> and </url> statements contains the information associated with a page on your website. Each <url> record may contain the following elements:
<loc> - This is the URL of the page in question. If you wish to remove a page from your sitemap, you’ll need to delete the entire <url> record for the page in question. This is the only required field.
<priority> - This how you can rank your pages in terms of importance. The priority element can contain a value between 0.0 and 1.0; the higher the value, the higher the page will rank in relation to the other pages in your website.
<lastmod> - The date (and time) the page was last updated.
<changefreq> - How often the page is updated.
You can edit these records like you would any other text file. Simply save when you are finished.
Updating the robots.txt file
To assist the search engines even further, you can edit the robots.txt file in the root directory of your website. The robots.txt file is the first file the search engine crawler programs check for on any website. Generally, it is used to inform the search engine which pages not to index, but it can also be used to point to your sitemap file. To do this, use a standard text editor and add the following line to the robots.txt file:
Sitemap: http://www.mysite.com/sitemap.xml
Of course, you’ll need to replace the above address with the actual location of your sitemap file.
Don’t have a robots.txt file on your website? No problem, just open up you text editor and paste the following.
User-agent: *
Disallow:
Sitemap: http://www.mysite.com/sitemap.xml
Save the file as robots.txt, upload it to your site, and you’ll be ready to go!
Submitting Your Sitemap Directly
Several search engines allow you to directly submit your sitemap to them. Though this isn’t necessary it does speed up the process a bit. The sites listed below require you to create an account. You can do so absolutely free of charge, and when you are signed up you can take advantage of the other tools these sites have to offer.
Google - http://www.google.com/webmasters/start/
Yahoo! - http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/
MSN - http://webmaster.live.com/
Final Thought
The XML sitemap is a great aid to search engine optimization, but it isn’t a replacement for good web design. You still want to be sure that your website has good content and that you are practicing the other elements of proper search engine optimization. Having said that, may the addition of the XML sitemap help you to “crawl” to the top of the search engine rankings…
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