This is the third post in my series looking at Webmaster and SEO tools. Today I am going to look at XML Sitemaps which I briefly discussed in my previous article in this series.
In a nutshell, a sitemap will enable search engines like Google and Yahoo to better crawl and index your site. The more these search engines know about your web site structure, the greater chance there is of increased traffic being driven to your site.
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.
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10 responses so far ↓
1 rankos // May 6, 2007 at 11:49 am
great article.
thanks
2 Art // Jun 16, 2007 at 10:52 am
If you have any problems to create XML sitemap files for your sites or to notify search engines about updated sitemap files, try Sitemap Writer Pro. It is a powerfull tool that helps you to create and keep up-to-date sitemaps for your websites.
Sitemap Writer Pro has new tools – FTP manager for uploading sitemaps, search engine notification tool (now supports for Google, Yahoo, Ask.com and MSN.com), site crawler for adding an URLs into the sitemap and Yahoo Index viewer.
3 OOM // Jul 27, 2007 at 9:31 pm
Like this one. I think xml-sitemaps.com is probably the best choice.
4 OOM // Jul 27, 2007 at 9:32 pm
Just looked at sitemapwriter.com, this one seems pretty good as well, it would be useful to see a comparison between xml-sitemaps.com and this one.
5 Dean // Jul 27, 2007 at 10:07 pm
A comparison of XML sitemap generators is a great idea. I’ll start looking into this and will write an article on this later on. Thanks.
6 Mani // Aug 14, 2007 at 7:42 am
Nice article Dean,
Well written and very informative.
Cheers!
Mani
7 Ed // Aug 17, 2007 at 8:00 am
Dean, it’ a great idea! Please make an comparison if only for xml-sitemaps.com and sitemapwriter.com
Thank you for your article!
8 mervandi // Sep 12, 2007 at 2:26 am
another good article. i used to come to mypagerank.com to check my blog rank there. and they also generated sitemap xml for my blog (www.TheGeom.com), but from this article, now i know what i should do with the xml file. thank you. i’ve been considering the wordpress plugin too, luckily i found this article, so i consider it no more.
9 Mick // Nov 15, 2007 at 2:05 pm
You should also consider A1 Sitemap Generator. I have scanned very large websites with no problems and it gives details information about broken links and redirects.
It can also create HTML sitemaps with e.g. 2 columns spanning multiple pages.
10 Preetha Prasad (preetha) 's status on Wednesday, 11-Nov-09 11:09:50 UTC - Identi.ca // Nov 11, 2009 at 11:09 am
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