XML sitemap is used by spiders to ease the tracking of content in the website. XML sitemap is an XML file that contains all the links available in a particular website and also information on the las updated date of those particular pages along with information on how often will the page be updated. The more frequent the page is updated, the more time spiders will visit that particular page to update their database.
How does XML sitemap look like
A very basic XML sitemap that contains one URL will look something as follow:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"> <url> <loc>http://www.example.com/</loc> <lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod> <changefreq>monthly</changefreq> <priority>0.8</priority> </url> </urlset>
Check out sitemaps.org for further details on all the available tags and how to implement them.
How to Generate Sitemaps Easily
Depending on the system and the hosting you are using, there are different ways to generate sitemap.
- Create it yourself. This option is only good when you do not have a lot of pages in your site. But if you have more than 10 pages, I do not recommend creating the sitemaps yourself. It is a headache.
- Use readily available sitemap generator. This is the better option, and moreover it is freely available, so why not?
Easy to Use Sitemap Generator
If you are using WordPress, it is quite easy to get a sitemap. Just install the sitemap plug-in for wordpress and your sitemap will be generated and submitted automatically to search engines.
For others, use the tool provided by XML Sitemap. This is a very good tool that will crawl all the available location in your site and generates the corresponding sitemap. Remember to check the generated sitemap though, since there are some pages that you would not want google, yahoo or MSN to index.
What To Do With Generated Sitemap?
After you have a sitemap, it is time to submit it to the search engines so they can start crawling your site. See the procedure on submitting web pages to Google, Yahoo and MSN. Although there are more search engines out there, most probably you just need to submit your sitemap to the biggest search engines.
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