Depending on the nature and the size of the website. A sitemap is important to get all your web pages indexed, or at least found.
What is a Sitemap?
A Sitemap is nothing more than the list of all your active web pages.
Why use a Sitemap?
Easy, it allows the search engine spiders to index every web page that you want found. Also it allows your visitors to locate a web page quickly.
Be sure to have a link to your sitemap page from the main page. Then be sure to have a link to the sitemap on every web page.
Microsoft, Google and Yahoo agreed on a standard for sitemaps using the XML standard.
Sitemaps.org is the official web site that describes the protocol.
The accepted standard is a sitemap created in XML.
Sample Code:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84 http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84/sitemap.xsd">
<url><loc>http://www.smittysholdings.com/index.php</loc>
<lastmod>2008-03-21T10:04:09-04:00</lastmod>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
<priority>1.0</priority>
</url>
</urlset>
The optional elements include:
- the date the page was last modified
- the frequency at which the page is likely to change
- the priority of the page relative to other pages on the site. The priority is a numeric value between 0 and 1, and the default is set to 0.5. The idea is to set a higher priority value for pages that you consider more important and want to ensure that the crawlers give them priority
To learn more about XML sitemaps, visit sitemap.org
Depending on the nature and the size of the website. A sitemap is important to get all your web pages indexed, or at least found.
What is a Sitemap?
A Sitemap is nothing more than the list of all your active web pages.
Why use a Sitemap?
Easy, it allows the search engine spiders to index every web page that you want found. Also it allows your visitors to locate a web page quickly.
Be sure to have a link to your sitemap page from the main page. Then be sure to have a link to the sitemap on every web page.
