Free Website Content
The Ins and Outs of Sitemaps
The Ins and Outs of Internet Sitemaps
Sitemaps are simply "road maps" that search engines
can use to navigate their way through the various parts
and sections of a website. The sitemap essentially tells
the search engines where the various pages are located
on the site. This is particularly important for websites
that have multi-level navigation, which automated spiders
might have difficulty with.
These sitemaps are not difficult to create.
Google, Bing, and Yahoo all use a standard sitemap protocol.
The larger search engines accept sitemaps in an xml
file, and Google goes a step further by accepting them
as .txt files or as an RSS feed (which essentially contains
a list of URLs on the website).
Webmasters need not struggle with the
creation of a sitemap, as there are a number of freely-available
tools that will spider their site and create a sitemap
in all the accepted formats. One such product is the
free "GSiteCrawler" which can be found at http://gsitecrawler.com/
.
If you would prefer to create the sitemap
manually, simply open WordPad or any other text editing
program, and create a new document. Then, enter the
following at the top:
[?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?]
[urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"]
(in all these examples, replace the square brackets
[ ] with greater than and less than signs < >)
After that, for each URL in the website
that you want the search engines to spider, create a
set of [url] [/url] tags, and between them enter a single,
full URL inside a set of [loc] [/loc] tags. The subsequent
3 fields shown in the example below are all optional:
the [lastmod] tag refers to the last time the webpage
was modified; the [changefreq] tag refers to the frequency
that the page is changed; and the [priority] tag refers
to how important the page is. If you are using software
to create the sitemap, the software will automatically
populate these fields. If you are manually creating
the sitemap, you can choose not to populate them...
[url]
[loc]http://www.domainname.com/[/loc]
[lastmod]2009-09-09[/lastmod]
[changefreq]daily[/changefreq]
[priority]0.5[/priority]
[/url]
Repeat the above for each page URL you
want included in the sitemap. After all URLs have been
added, close the [urlset] tag as follows:
[/urlset]
Save the file as an XML file. An example
of a sitemap file for a site with 2 URLs should look
similar to this:
[?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?]
[urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"]
[url]
[loc]http://www.domainname.com/[/loc]
[lastmod]2009-09-09[/lastmod]
[changefreq]daily[/changefreq]
[priority]0.5[/priority]
[/url]
[loc]http://www.domainname.com/[/loc]
[lastmod]2009-10-09[/lastmod]
[changefreq]daily[/changefreq]
[priority]0.8[/priority]
[/url]
[/urlset]
(again, remember to replace square brackets
[ ] with greater than and less than symbols < > which
are standard in the tags of any markup language)
Submitting A Sitemap
There are a couple of different ways to submit your
sitemap to the various search engines. If you have an
account in Google Webmaster Tools or Bing Webmaster
Central, you can submit your sitemap through your accounts
there. Additionally, you can ping the sitemap using
the following syntax for Bing, Google, MoreOver, and
Ask...
Bing:
http://www.bing.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?siteMap=http://www.domain.com/sitemap.xml
Google:
http://www.google.com/webmaster/tools/ping?sitemap=http://www.domain.com/sitemap.xml
MoreOver: http://api.moreover.com/ping?u=http://www.domain.com/sitemap.xml
Ask: http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http://www.domain.com/sitemap.xml
Sitemaps are simply maps for search engines
to follow, and will ensure that all the important pages
on your website are spidered and included in the various
search engines.
About the Author:
Sharon Housley manages marketing for FeedForAll http://www.feedforall.com
software for creating, editing, publishing RSS feeds
and podcasts. In addition Sharon manages marketing for
RecordForAll http://www.recordforall.com
audio recording and editing software.
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.
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