After Google,yahoo and Microsoft agreeing on using on sitemap configuration for indexing any website or blog its going to be an important factor to come into search engines. Sitemaps aren’t any scary thing.To make them is a peace of cake just remember to not change your links too often else it will break your indexing on search engines.I am already using sitemap for my blog and will tell you what and how it works.Lets Start!!

What are sitemaps?

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Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional meta data about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.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. Using the Sitemap protocol does not guarantee that web pages are included in search engines, but provides hints for web crawlers to do a better job of crawling your site.Ok now that was a little geeky for readers who doesn’t know about these at all.I will make it easy for them.

Sitemaps are “Maps” of any internet site you visit.Its similar to any countries map which tell which place is exactly at which address.Suppose for an example of you look on India’s Map and you want to find a city like Delhi….it will tell u exactly where it is in india.Easy!!.

The search engines are programs not humans so they will work in their fashion.They look into a file called as “sitemap.xml” ,which they will read and find out where it is and then go ahead to see whats inside it.I hope this helps� everybody.

Sitemaps XML format:

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The Sitemap protocol format consists of XML tags. All data values in a Sitemap must be entity-escaped. The file itself must be UTF-8 encoded.The Sitemap must:

• Begin with an opening tag and end with a closing tag.
• Specify the namespace (protocol standard) within the tag.
• Include a entry for each URL, as a parent XML tag.
• Include a child entry for each parent tag.

Sample XML Sitemap

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The following example shows a Sitemap that contains just one URL and uses all optional tags. The optional tags are in italics.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<urlset xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″  >

<url>

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

<lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod> 

<changefreq>monthly</changefreq> 

<priority>0.8</priority>

</url> </urlset>

You can add any number of url set according to number of pages you have in your site or blog.Google ask to keep it the root directory preferably and if your blog is in sub directly it allows but too� much of nesting will create problems for crawlers.

For Bloggers:

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There are two plugin implemented for wordpress and it works on 2.0.I have implemented both of them.

• Sitemap.xml Generator…….Demo on my blog here.This plugin is great.It can build your sitemap and ping google about it too.It rebuilds your sitemap every time you make a post or page and ping again.Buy my suggestion is after you create a sitemap,you should go and submit by telling the location of your stitemap individually. This will be helpful in SEO
• Visual Sitemap Generaor.…..Demo on my blog here.This one is useful for viewers who are looking for a particular category.They can just go the page and find and then click on it to read the post.Too good. This can be helpful for new readers

I think every blogger and site owners should implement both of them.One of my suggestion about the second plugin is if there can a sitemap generator which can have a thumbnail of all the pages…just a showoff.Go and implement it.

Tags: crawlers, search engines, sitemap, webmasters, XML