SEO Tutorials
FRIday, 11th November 2011 @ 12 pm
by Yellow Spirit
“Sitemaps gives a basic structural idea to both users and search engines. XML Sitemaps are specially for better understanding of Search Engines. ”
Sitemap is the design history of your page. its not only for the search engine, in a complex site design sitemap is also helpful for the designer. normal users can also be benifited from html sitemaps.
Sitemaps as a definition is a list of all pages with links that consists in a website including sub domains. This list is in general sorted in a hierarchical fashion. Sitemap can be in any format and also serve many purpose. Sitemap can be a webpage with the list.
Basically sitemaps now divided into two different kinds. One is the plain html sitemaps and the other is the xml sitemaps. The most common plain html sitemaps are being used by peoples for many years which were intending to help both users and search engines to find a way through site for both navigation and the indexing purpose. This basic html sitemaps also has the advantage that they can be used in pages where there is a possibility for site contents being orphaned because of using frame, iframe, JavaScript etc.
Also from this text links search engines also get idea about your other pages content. So html sitemaps are very useful for SEO purpose. Hence everybody should keep one html sitemap and link it in every single page.
XML Sitemap is sometimes also called as Google sitemap because Google was the first to introduce xml sitemaps in 2005.XML sitemap is also a list of WebPages of your site but not written in html but in xml so that search engine can read and get an idea about site structure. The xml sitemaps are designed to read by the search engines not by the users. Users will never see it. Now every major search engine supports xml sitemap.
The instructions to the sitemap are given to the crawler bot by a Robots Text file named as robots.txt in the domain root folder. And this xml sitemap file normally named as sitemp.xml and positioned in the domain root directory.
So before placing we need to create a sitemap of our website. There a lot alternative way to create a sitemap of website. Some content management system like Joomla, Drupal, WordPress has their own build in xml sitemap generator, if you use one of these then you just have activate the related plug-in or application. And your sitemap will be created and updated automatically whenever you change a thing.
But if you have a really huge custom made dynamic website then your site program should contain sitemap function. You can find a lot sitemap code on the net. For a medium and small website there are some online xml sitemap generator tools available, you can search and find them. One of them is www.xml-sitemaps.com and hope you will like it. If your website contains less than 500 pages then you can create a free xml sitemap from here. Just enter you site and press start it will crawl all the pages from your site and give you a downloadable xml sitemap which you can eventually put in your domain root. You can edit these xml sitemap file if you understand the code otherwise leave as default.
There are some types of xml sitemaps available. There are as follow:
- Basic web pages xml sitemaps
- Image sitemaps
- Video sitemaps
- News sitemaps
Each sitemaps has values depending on the interest of yours and content of your site. There are some commercial site who build all these sitemaps.
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