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What Is An XML
Web
Sitemap And Why Should I Have One On My Website?
Copyright
© by John
Baril
An XML web
sitemap is an index that contains
every single web page on your website. There are two kinds of sitemaps
that you
can use. One type of web sitemap helps your site visitors find their
way around
your site, and the other type is an XML file that helps Google and
other search
engines crawl and find pages on your website more easily.
In this
article, we’ll take a look at XML
sitemaps; sitemaps that help search engine spiders find and crawl your
web
pages.
Google
introduced XML sitemaps under Creative
Commons licensing in 2005, which has also been taken up by Yahoo and
Microsoft.
All three search engine companies support the Sitemap 0.9 protocol,
which you
can read more about at http://www.sitemaps.org.
This is good
news for webmasters because they
only have to upload one type of sitemap. You should be aware that a web
sitemap
won’t guarantee every page on your website will be included
in search engine
listings. However, having a sitemap definitely improves your chances of
getting
your pages on search results as quickly as possible.
There may be
some of you who are interested in
learning if your website needs an XML sitemap. I’ll explain
below.
If your website
is new or has become a huge site
and doesn’t have a clear architecture, or your website uses a
lot of Flash or
Ajax applications, an XML web sitemap will help ensure that Google will
find
your pages and add them to search listings.
If
you’re constantly updating your web pages, an
XML sitemap will ensure that your updates are indexed more quickly.
However, small
sites that contain only a few
pages probably don’t need an XML sitemap because the pages
will be easily found
by search engine spiders.
If you
don’t know how to make an XML sitemap,
don’t worry! There is a simple, free sitemap generator at
http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/aff/idevaffiliate.php?id=887. This site
won’t only
make a sitemap for your website, but it’ll also check how
many broken links
there are on your website. However, if you want to follow up on that
information, you’ll have to pay to receive details of the
locations of those
links.
To produce a
sitemap, simply click the
"Free Online Sitemap Generator" link, enter your website URL in the
appropriate field, and choose the frequency with which you wish to have
your
XML sitemap updated. You’ll then have to set another couple
of variables and
hit the start button. The free version will index up to 500 pages. If
your
website has more than 500 pages, you can pay to have an unlimited
number of
pages listed on your XML web sitemap, but for most websites the free
version
will be adequate.
You can watch
the progress of the sitemap
generation in a new browser after clicking the button. In less than a
minute
the system will generate a sitemap and HTML code for you which you can
copy and
paste into a notebook file and upload to your "public_html/" folder.
After
you’ve done that, go to Google.com
(google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/siteoverview) and either log-in or
setup a
Webmasters account and add your sitemap URL.
The whole
process of making a web sitemap with
the free online sitemap generator can be done in a matter of minutes,
and once
you’ve done it, you won’t need to do anything else.
From now on you can be sure
that your website will be comprehensively indexed by Google and the
other
search engines.
I
wish you the best of success,
John Baril
Copyright © John Baril
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