Importance of a sitemap to an SEO-Friendly Website

The first step is to ensure that your site can be found and crawled by search engines. This is not as simple as it sounds, as there are many popular web designs and implementation constructs that the crawlers may not understand.

As far as Google is concerned, they might as well not exist—great content, good keyword targeting, and smart marketing won’t make any difference at all if the spiders can’t reach those pages in the first place.

XML Sitemaps

Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft all support a protocol known as XML Sitemaps. Google first announced it in 2005, and then Yahoo! and Microsoft agreed to support the protocol in 2006. Using the Sitemaps protocol you can supply the search engines with a list of all the URLs you would like them to crawl and index.

Layout of an XML Sitemap

The first step in the process of creating an XML Sitemap is to create an .xml Sitemap file in a suitable format. Since creating an XML Sitemap requires a certain level of technical know-how, it would be wise to involve your development team in the XML Sitemap generator process from the beginning.

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<urlset xmlns=http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.9>
<url>
<loc>http://www.freesitemapgenerator.com/</loc>
<lastmod>2010-03-01T05:37:53+00:00</lastmod>
<priority>1.00</priority>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.freesitemapgenerator.com/</loc>
<lastmod>2010-03-01T05:37:53+00:00</lastmod>
<priority>1.00</priority>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
</url>

</urlset>

An XML Sitemap generator

This is a simple script that you can configure to automatically create Sitemaps, and sometimes submit them as well. Sitemap generators can create these Sitemaps from a URL list, access logs, or a directory path hosting static files corresponding to URLs. Here are some examples of XML Sitemap generators:

• SourceForge.net’s google-sitemap_gen
• ROR Sitemap Generator
• XML-Sitemaps.com Sitemap Generator
• Sitemaps Pal
• XML Echo

Simple text

You can provide Google with a simple text file that contains one URL per line. However,Google recommends that once you have a text Sitemap file for your site, you use theSitemap Generator to create a Sitemap from this text file using the Sitemaps protocol.

Syndication feed

Google accepts Really Simple Syndication (RSS) 2.0 and Atom 1.0 feeds. Note that the feed may provide information on recent URLs only.

What to include in a Sitemap file

When you create a Sitemap file you need to take care to include only the canonical version of each URL. In other words, in situations where your site has multiple URLs that refer to one.

Where to upload your Sitemap file
When your Sitemap file is complete, upload the file to your site in the highest-level directory you want search engines to crawl (generally, the root directory). If you list URLs in your Sitemap that are at a higher level than your Sitemap location, the search engines will be unable to include those URLs as part of the Sitemap submission.

Google and the other major search engines discover and index websites by crawling links. Google XML Sitemaps are a way to feed the URLs that you want crawled on your site to Google for more complete crawling and indexation, which results in improved long tail search ability. By creating and updating this .xml file, you are helping to ensure that Google recognizes your entire site, and this recognition will help people find your site.