Introduction

A good place to start for an overview is sitemaps.org. They provide the following definition of a sitemap:

Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.

If you want to go into more detail regarding the structure of these sitemaps then I suggest you read their protocol page. This will give you an example of a basic XML sitemap together with an explanation of each of the tags that make up the XML sitemap file.

Submitting Sitemaps to the Major Search Engines

So how do you go about creating one of these XML sitemaps and submitting it to the search engines?

If you’re using WordPress then I recommend you take a look at the Google Sitemap Generator plugin. This plugin generates an XML Sitemap of your WordPress blog. Whenever you change, edit, create or publish a post, the plugin will automatically update your sitemap and ping the new sitemap to Google. It’s a great solution for people who want to simply install a plugin and then forget about it.

If you’re not using WordPress, or you run into problems using the plugin, then there a host of web sites which offer a free online service which will generate a sitemap for you.

The one I am currently using is XML-Sitemaps.com. This site provides a free online sitemap generator. You simply enter your website address and then press the start button. You then wait a few minutes for it to crawl your site. The end result is an XML file which you can then save to your computer. You then submit this XML file to Google. They also provide a Text sitemap which you can submit to Yahoo.

These online XML sitemap generators works fine for small sized web sites but for a large web site containing thousands of links then it may not be a viable option. The XML sitemap generator will also report any broken links on your web site, but you have to pay the small sum of $5 before you can access this information. When I generated my sitemap it reported over 200 broken links, so I decided to pay the $5 to see what these were. It turned out that every broken link was simply a link to my Feedburner feed which I have on each page on my web site. I’m not sure why it reports this as a broken link?

Once you have your XML sitemap saved on your computer, the next step is to submit the sitemap to the major search engines. There are three main options available.

1. If you’re using Google Webmaster Tools then you need to logon to your Google Webmaster Tools account and add the sitemap, more details on this are covered in my previous article in this series.

2. You can modify your robots.txt file to include a line which specifies the location of your sitemap. This will enable crawlers to automatically find your sitemap the next time they crawl your site. More details on this procedure can be found on the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog.

3. Submit your sitemap using an HTTP request. You simply enter the following into a browser, replacing {searchengine_URL} with the URL provided by the search engine.

{searchengine_URL}/ping?sitemap=sitemap_url

Summary

That just about covers sitemaps for now. They’re pretty easy to setup and maintain and I recommend you invest the time to get a sitemap setup on your web site. If you use sitemaps in conjunction with other SEO tips then you increase the likelihood of traffic coming to your site.

technical-itch