XML Sitemap: An Integral Part of Your SEO Plan

Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform the search engines about all the pages on their websites that are available for indexing or crawling. These are basically the tree structure of the website showing the hierarchy of the pages and the clear structure of website architecture and navigation. Usually, search engine crawlers discover a new page from the links within the site and from other sites. Creation of sitemaps helps in providing this data to the crawlers.

Sitemaps can be of two types: HTML and XML. HTML sitemaps are simple HTML files containing links to the individual pages of the website.

Another very important type of sitemaps is XML sitemap. In the simplest form, an XML Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL. These metadata are the last updated or modified date, the change frequency, importance of individual pages, relative to other URLs of the site etc. These are the additional information for the Search Engine crawlers.

The Sitemap protocol format consists of XML tags. The file must be UTF-8 encoded and data values in the Sitemaps should be entity escaped. The XML Sitemap must:

* Begin with an opening tag and end with a closing tag.

* The namespace (protocol standard) should be specified within the tag.

* A entry must be included for each URL, as a parent XML tag.

* A child entry must be included for each parent tag.

All other tags like , etc. are optional and support for these optional tags may vary among Search Engines.

Another very important aspect to be remembered is that all URLs in a Sitemap must be from a single host, such as www.example.com.

A sample XML sitemap

?XML version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?

urlset XMLns=http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9

mlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"

xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9

http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd"

url

loc http://www.example.com/ /loc

lastmod 2005-01-01 /lastmod

chagefreq monthly /changefreq

priority 0.8 /priority

/url

/urlset

Location of a Sitemap file

The location of a Sitemap file determines the set of URLs that can be included in that Sitemap. An XML Sitemap located at www . example . com/dir1/sitemap.XML can include any URLs starting with www . example . com/dir1/ but not the ones which include URLs starting with www . example . com/dir2/.

So, the Sitemap should always be located under the root directory to include all the pages of the website.

Informing the Search Engines

After creating the Sitemap and placed it on the Web server, the Search Engines that support this protocol must be informed of its location. This can be done by:

submitting it to the search engine via their submission interface

specifying the location in the robots.txt file

sending an HTTP request

The search engines can then retrieve the Sitemap and make the URLs available to their crawlers.