WikiPedia defines a Sitemap as a representation of the architecture of a web site. 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.
Sitemaps are very useful especially for Blogs where the content changes dynamically whenever a new topic posted to give the Page Information to Search Engine Bots. And sitemaps are useful for those websites whose Pages are not interlinked properly. Web crawlers usually discover pages from links within the site and from other sites. Sitemaps supplement this data to allow crawlers that support Sitemaps to pick up all URLs in the Sitemap and learn about those URLs using the associated metadata. WebPages pages which have Ajax and Flash find it difficult to get crawled by Search Engines and using a sitemap will solve the problem.
A Sitemap can be in two forms; 1 HTML sitemap 2. XML Sitemap. Did you notice I used ‘s’ in lower case for HTML and “S” in upper case for XML. HTML sitemap is a simple and normal webpage where the pages of the Website are shown in a hierarchical fashion can be included in a website along with other pages and is purely to help the website viewers to tell them how the website pages are interlaced.
XML Sitemap is an XML file that lists all the pages or URLs available in that Domain. Additionally XML Sitemap provides the additional data (Meta Data) like “Change Frequency”, “Last Modified”, “Priority” etc.
Change Frequency: Change Frequency indicates how frequently the content at a particular URL is likely to change.
Last Modified: The time the URL was last modified. This information allows crawlers to avoid recrawling documents that haven’t changed. You can let the generator set this field from your server’s response headers or to specify your own date and time.
Priority: The priority of a particular URL relative to other pages on the same site. The value for this tag is a number between 0.0 and 1.0, where 0.0 identifies the lowest priority page(s) on your site and 1.0 identifies the highest priority page(s) on your site. The default priority of a page will be 0.5.
Some General rules for making a Sitemap:
- Sitemap can have upto 50000 URLs
- Sitemap can be split to multiple small Sitemaps
- Can not be larger that 10Mb.
- A Sitemap can have a Sitemap within it and can not have more than 1000 Sitemaps
Sample XML Sitemap Index
The below is the Sample XML Sitemap file.
<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<sitemapindex xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″>
<sitemap>
<loc>http://www.example.com/sitemap1.xml.gz</loc>
<lastmod>2004-10-01T18:23:17+00:00</lastmod>
</sitemap>
<sitemap>
<loc>http://www.example.com/sitemap2.xml.gz</loc>
<lastmod>2009-03-12</lastmod>
</sitemap>
</sitemapindex>
SiteMap for WordPress Blog:
Do we need to prepare a Sitemap manually for a Self-hosted WordPress Blog. A big NO, just install an XML Sitemap Plug in and rest it will do for you.
I think u have a good point here good points but i think you should also tell them how to create each one .
@Paul, Thank you for your comments and suggestion. I’ll definitely include that in future article.
Hello!
Very Interesting post! Thank you for such interesting resource!
PS: Sorry for my bad english, I’v just started to learn this language
See you!
Your, Raiul Baztepo
Hello !! ^_^
My name is Piter Kokoniz. oOnly want to tell, that I like your blog very much!
And want to ask you: what was the reasson for you to start this blog?
Sorry for my bad english:)
Thank you:)
Your Piter Kokoniz, from Latvia
Hi Piter, Thank you very much. I’m basically a designer, Programmer and run my own Web Designing Company. I just thought to share all my experiences and started this website. But due to my busy schedule I couldn’t spend much of time to improve as well as write more articles.
Thanks,Guru
emm. informative
I Like the post. I guess it’s hardly suprising that with the focus on pleasing the search engines, XML sitemaps have become important. But if it’s all about providing a better user experience, then HTML sitemaps should not be forgotten.
I want to thank the blogger very much not only for this post but also for his all previous efforts. I found seoguruz.com to be very interesting. I will be coming back to seoguruz.com for more information.
When do you think you will update with a new post like this. I feel that whole area of SEM/SEO/Social Network needs to get noticed more.