Customer Street SEO Articles & Help

The First Sitemaps

One of the newer additions to the Webmasters artillery, and a staple of Customer Street domains, is the XML sitemap.

The standard visitor sitemap has been around since websites began but only as a tool for site visitors to find the product or page that they are looking for. This is great for the user and it turned out to be great for the search engine spiders too as it gave them a central page from which they could access every URL of a site.

The XML Sitemap

The XML sitemap on the other hand is a lot more comprehensive. Originally conceived by Google in 2005 the XML Sitemap is designed to provide the search engines with information relating to each URL of your website and a “road map” for the spiders to find all your sites content. This is particularly necessary for sites that have URLs which are only accessible through links within forms.

The XML sitemap consists of a list of entries, each entry detailing specific information relating to each URL. The parameters that each entry includes are:

• The URL
• A priority score between 0.0 and 1.0
• How frequently the page is changed or updated

Using the three parameters above it is possible to communicate with the search engines and point them in the direction of your best, newest and most important content. For a more detailed description of the various parameters see sitemaps.org protocol.

Creating the XML Sitemap

The simplest way to create an XML sitemap for your site is to use this XML sitemap generator tool, however once you become familiar with how the XML sitemap is built it becomes very simple.

Informing the search engines of your new XML Sitemap

Once you have created the sitemap you need to inform the search engines that you’ve done this. First you need to upload the XML sitemap to your root directory and add the location to your robots.txt file using the following line of code:

Sitemap: http://www.mysite.com/sitemap.xml

Once you’ve done this you need to sign up for Google Webmaster Tools. Within this very powerful utility there is an option for you to submit a sitemap to their index. Click ‘Add a Sitemap’, enter the URL of the XML sitemap e.g. http://www.mysite.com/sitemap.xml and submit it!

You will also need to ping the other search engines to inform them that your new XML sitemap is ready for spidering. For more information on exactly how to ping a search engine see here or use this very handy ping tool.

Every time you update your XML sitemap you will need to repeat the pinging process.