How to make a sitemap for site and blogs ?

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?

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:

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

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:

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.

About The Author of this article:
Ashish is one of the co-author of this blog and writes on various interesting softwares, PC tips and more. You can read more of his articles here.

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13 Comments and Link-Backs to “How to make a sitemap for site and blogs ?”

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12 Comments from Friends and Readers

Ken Xu, May 21, 2007:

Interesting! Nice guide, sir!
I haven’t implemented any plugin for sitemapping my blogs! This information is a “real” crucial issue since I haven’t got a good ranking in SERP!
Ashish Mohta, May 21, 2007:

@Kunxu: Thanks! Its very important. You should also include the sitemap path in robots.txt
Arthur, May 21, 2007:

If you have any problems to create XML sitemap files for your sites or to notify search engines about updated sitemap files, try Sitemap Writer Pro. It is a powerfull tool that helps you to create and keep up-to-date sitemaps for your websites.
Sitemap Writer Pro has new tools - FTP manager for uploading sitemaps, search engine notification tool (now supports Googel, Yahoo, Ask.com and MSN.com), site crawler for adding an URLs into the sitemap and Yahoo Index viewer.
Atul, May 21, 2007:

Nice post Ashish , yes sitemap plays important role and helps search engine robots and crawlers to understand the website , which helps them to index your content easily .
Shankar Ganesh, May 21, 2007:

Good post Ashish. I’m using the Google Sitemaps plugin by Arne. Is that a good one?
Ashish Mohta, May 21, 2007:

@Arthur: Thanks for the links. I find them useful. Lets see what other readers say about it
Big Daddy, May 22, 2007:

Hey Ashish

Nice blog!!!Good interpretation of some useful link with the sitemap. But how does this works and what is the priority??? If there are people with the same priority with the respective link one is searching for then who gets the preference?
Ashish Mohta, May 22, 2007:

@Big Daddy: Priority defines how often the a post is updated and its restricted to just your site and not compared with others. So if we both have a site which have sitemap it does not matter even our posts are having same priority.

Now coming to the search thing. See coming in the top 10 of google search will depend how popular yous post is and whats the keyword used. So if somebody searches with “how to make sitemap for my blog” I might get into top 10 list if my site is more popular and good page rank. But again if there is some other sites who have already written it and they are more popular they get ranking better than me.

I will give you call tonight. Thanks for keeping track of my site.
Madhur Kapoor, May 22, 2007:

Ashish sir , whats the diffrence between Sitemap.xml and robots.txt
Ashish Mohta, May 22, 2007:

@Madhur: Sitemap.xml is like a map of your blog or site which tells what is where abd which is more important. Robots.txt is a file which is mostly used by crawlers and has more functionality. You can restrict crawlers to some of you pages or even website so they don’t index it on their search engine. Mostly it is used to give more control over your site in terms of SEO
Shawn, August 14, 2007:

AutoMapIt.com will spider your entire site and deliver the sitemaps including all of your URLs. It will also deliver other formats including RSS, ROR, OPML (think blogroll), Yahoo, and of course, GoogleXML and an HTML sitemap for your visitors. It will also add a site-wide search feature that you can easily add to your pages.

It’s the ONE solution for sitemaps. It’s available for free or for $1 per update for advanced features.
Ankit Garg, June 24, 2008:

hey

that was very well explained.