About Xml Sitemaps

general xml and site map information

At its most simple, a Sitemap is a list of the pages that make up your website.
create an xml sitemap with xml sitemap generator

Having a Sitemap and submitting it to Google, helps make sure that Google knows about all the pages on your site This also helps get more of your pages indexed within google which in turn can help increase traffic to you website. Sitemaps are particularly helpful if: * Your site has dynamic content. * Your site has pages that aren't easily discovered by Googlebot during the crawl process - for example, pages featuring rich AJAX or Flash. * Your site is new and has few links to it. (Googlebot crawls the web by following links from one page to another, so if your site isn't well linked, it may be hard for us to discover it.) * Your site has a large archive of content pages that are not well linked to each other, or are not linked at all. You can also use a Sitemap to provide Google with additional information about your pages, including: * How often the pages on your site change. For example, you might update your product page daily, but update your About Me page only once every few months. * The date each page was last modified. * The relative importance of pages on your site. For example, your home page might have a relative importance of 1.0, category pages have an importance of 0.8, and individual blog entries or product pages have an importance of 0.5. This priority only indicates the importance of a particular URL relative to other URLs on your site, and doesn't impact the ranking of your pages in search results. Sitemaps provide additional information about your site to Google, complementing our normal methods of crawling the web. We expect they will help us crawl more of your site and in a more timely fashion, but we can't guarantee that URLs from your Sitemap will be added to the Google index. Sites are never penalized for submitting Sitemaps.

A site map (or sitemap) is a list of pages of a web site accessible to crawlers or users. It can be either a document in any form used as a planning tool for web design, or a web page that lists the pages on a web site, typically organized in hierarchical fashion. This helps visitors and search engine bots find pages on the site. While some developers argue that site index is a more appropriately used term to relay page function, web visitors are used to seeing each term and generally associate both as one and the same.

Site maps can improve search engine optimization of a site by making sure that all the pages can be found. This is especially important if a site uses a dynamic access to content such as Adobe Flash or JavaScript menus that do not include HTML links. They also act as a navigation aid by providing an overview of a site's content at a single glance. Most search engines will only follow a finite number of links from a page, so if the number of links is very large, the site map may be required so that search engines and visitors can access all content on the site. site index or sitemap?

A site index is often used to mean an A-Z index that provides access to particular content, while a site map provides a general top-down view of the overall site contents. Why sitemaps are important

Sitemaps have two fundamental uses within a web site. The first is as a guide to users to help them find their way around your site. The best type of sitemap to acheive this is a straigth forward html sitemap. An XML sitemap is mainly aimed at the search engines. An XML sitemap has a last modified tag which informs the search engines spiders how often the page is upadated. There is also a change frequency that lets a spider know when it should return to the page. Priority allows website owner to give priority to certain pages so that they will be spidered and indexed before others. example xml sitemap

Url Location

The url location :

<url><loc>http://www.xml-sitemapgenerator.com</loc></url>

This is the only part of an xml sitemap that is absolutely needed, all other tags such as change frequency and priority are optional. The url location tag lets Google or other search engine spiders know where the exact loaction of a page is also if you have multiple links with different urls to the same content then google will take the sitemap version as the cannonical link (authoritive link)

Change Frequency

<changefreq>Monthly</changefreq>

Change Frequency allows you to tell google and other search engines how frequently the content at a particular URL is likely to change. This is a useful option becuase if some pages on your site are reguarly updated then you have that content indexed faster than if your were just to allow Google to index in naturally.
The different values for this option are:

• Never (never changes)
• Always (content changes more than once in an hour).
• Hourly (content changes approx every hour).
• Daily (the content changes each day).
• Weekly(the content changes each week).
• Monthly (the content chages during a month).
• Yearly (content changes at least once a year).

Priority

<priority>0.8</priority>

The priority tag is used in XML sitemaps, to signal the importance of individual pages in the website. If the priority option is used in an xml sitemap, then once Google downloads your xml sitemap it will spider the pages with the highest priority first.
View out blog entry on Solving priority for maintained xml sitemaps

Last Modified

<lastmod>2009-06-30</lastmod>

The optional last modified tag in an xml sitemap, is a tag that gives Google more information and allows more optimal spidering of your site. Clearly it is more important to spider those pages which have changed since the last time google downloaded your xml sitemap and the last modified tag allows Google to acheive this.

Example Sitemap

click the link to our sitemap to see a xml site map as it appears online.

sitemap
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create your xml sitemap