|
Sitemaps For Websites
A sitemap is a page, or multiple pages, which lists all or most of the important pages on a web site. There are actually two types of sitemaps. One is a page that visitors can reference to look at all the categories and pages on your site. The other is created for search engine spiders so that they can see (and index) your pages.
A sitemap for visitors is self-explanatory, but the sitemap for search engines is an ‘XML’ document. Don’t fret; there are numerous sites online that will create an XML sitemap using your main URL and follow all the links in your site to create one sitemap. Example Sitemap: <?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 Online Sitemap Generator www.xml-sitemaps.com --> - <url> <loc>http://www.YOURDOMAINNAME.com/</loc> <changefreq>monthly</changefreq> </url> - <url> <loc>http://www.YOURDOMAINNAME.com.com/page,html/</loc> <changefreq>monthly</changefreq> </url> MORE LISTINGS…. </urlset> This sitemap at left was created for free by xml-sitemaps.com After you create and download your sitemap, upload it to your server so that the search engines can find it and index all of your pages. Name your sitemap: “sitemap.xml” and upload it to your server. Tell Google: After you have created an XML sitemap and uploaded it to the server, you should notify Google that it is available by visiting Google Webmaster Tools and submitting your sitemap’s URL (i.e. http://www.YOURDOMAINNAME.com/sitemap.xml) If your website is a WordPress blog, there is a ‘plugin’ for a Google sitemap creator that automatically updates your sitemap when new posts are published.
|