A sitemap will enable search engines like Google and Yahoo to better crawl and index your site.

The more search engines know about your web site structure, the greater chance there is of increased traffic being driven to your site. A good place to start for an overview is sitemaps.org. They provide the following definition of a sitemap:

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 metadata 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.

If you want to go into more detail regarding the structure of these sitemaps then I suggest you read their protocol page.

This will give you an example of a basic XML sitemap together with an explanation of each of the tags that make up the XML sitemap file.

Submitting XML Sitemaps to the Major Search Engines

So how do you go about creating one of these XML sitemaps and submitting it to the search engines?

If you’re using WordPress then I recommend you take a look at the Google Sitemap Generator plugin.

This plug in generates an XML Sitemap of your WordPress blog. Whenever you change, edit, create or publish a post, the plug in will automatically update your sitemap and ping the new sitemap to Google.

It’s a great solution for people who want to simply install a plug in and then forget about it.

If you’re not using WordPress, or you run into problems using the plug in, then there a host of web sites which offer a free online service which will generate a sitemap for you.

The one we use can be found at XML-Sitemaps.com.

This site provides a free online sitemap generator. You simply enter your website address and then press the start button. You then wait a few minutes for it to crawl your site.

The end result is an XML file which you can then save to your computer. You then submit this XML file to Google and other search engines.

This is a perfect XML sitemap solution if your website has less than 500 pages.

They do offer a paid version for over 500 pages – $10 – so well worth it

Pinging your Sitemap to the Search Engines

Once you have your XML sitemap saved on your computer, the next step is to submit the sitemap to the major search engines. There are three main options available.

• 1. If you use Google Webmaster Tools then you can login to your Google Webmaster Tools account and add the sitemap.

• 2. You can modify your robots.txt file to include a line which specifies the location of your sitemap. This will enable crawlers to automatically find your sitemap the next time they crawl your site. More details on this procedure can be found on the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog.

• 3. Our preferred choice is to Submit your sitemap using an HTTP request.

Here are the links for the major search engines

• http://www.bing.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?siteMap=

• http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=http://www.website.com/sitemap.xml

• http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/updateNotification?appid=YahooDemo&url=http://www.website.com/sitemap.xml

Simply replace http://www.website.com.sitemap.xml with your details, place in your web browser, click enter and you are done – You will be redirected to a success page once done.

XML Sitemaps and Pinging the Search Engines Summary

Sitemaps are easy to setup and maintain and we recommend you invest the time to get a sitemap setup on your web site.

If you use sitemaps in conjunction with other SEO tips then you increase the likelihood of traffic coming to your site.

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