Create sitemaps to promote your website

Scripts to Create Site Maps for Your Website

Consider creating a sitemap page with text links to every page within your site. You can submit this page, which will help the search engines locate pages within your website. Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling.

Using Sitemap can be particularly useful if you have some content that a search engine cannot navigate past, possibly involving flash, AJAX, or JavaScript. Remember, these days it is not just Google using Google Sitemaps; MSN, Yahoo, and Ask all use the same protocol for Sitemaps now. This is a way to help ensure that it gets indexed.

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.

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.

Two types of site maps
Site maps provide a two-fold purpose: 1) They provide search engine spiders easy access to all of your site pages. 2) They provide site visitors easy access to all of your site pages.

The difference is that search engine spiders and visitors access your site map differently and therefore there are different methods that need to be applied to creating site maps.

Site Map For Spiders
There are two files you must consider creating and uploading in the root directory of your Web host.

1. .xml file
An xml document containing links to all site pages.

2. Robots.txt file
You must then make the xml file accessible to search spiders. Reference the site map in your robots.txt file by adding a line for sitemap: URL (example: sitemap: http://www.mywebsiteworkout.com/sitemap.xml)

Site Map For Visitors
So many things you can do to make it easier for the visitors to easily access any page on your website. Some of those things are:

Navigation links
A site map designed for human visitors is just like any other website page. Link to the site map page should be included in the primary navigation or the site's global footer. Visitors should be able to find this link without too much searching.

Additional page links
Site map should also be linked from various pages within the site such as Help pages and your custom 404-redirect page. This helps point visitors to the site map as a quick and easy means to find what they need.

Overview
It's helpful to provide a short overview paragraph at the top of your site map page. This can be a nice introduction should someone land on this page directly from a search engine or elsewhere.

Heading and layout
The layout of the site map should present a clear visual hierarchical structure of your website. Both headings and sub-headings should be used above properly grouped links.

Text links & descriptions
Site map should primarily use textual links and page should not be cluttered with images or other distractions. It is also a good idea to provide an additional short description (provided there is room) for each link that allows the visitor to better understand where each link will take them.

Keep your site maps current
Be sure that both types of your site map are updated and uploaded frequently, or at least as often as pages are added or removed from your site.

In a Nutshell
Not every site needs a site map. But those that do should be sure that the site map they create are actually benefiting them. And the best way to do that is to make sure your site maps provide maximum usability for visitors and search engine spiders alike.

Related Items

sitemaps.org has a good explanation of 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.