Monday, December 22, 2008

Sitemap,Benifits of sitemap,XML sitemap

To help search engine bots find your pages on the site you need to create a sitemap.

A sitemap is a representation of the architecture or hierarchy of your site.It may be a document in any form used as a planning tool for web esign or webpage that will list all the pages of a website.It is often used to mean an A-Z index that provides access to particular content, while a site map provides a general top-down view of the overall site contents.




Benifits of sitemap are:

  • Site maps can improve search engine optimization of a site by making sure that all the pages can be found. This is specially important if a site uses Adobe Flash or JavaScript menus that do not include HTML links.

  • Most search engines will only follow a finite number of links from a page, so if a site is very large, the site map may be required so that search engines and visitors can access all content on the site.


    XML sitemap
    Google has introduced Google Sitemaps so that all web developers can publish lists of links from across their sites. The idea behind this is that some sites have a large number of dynamic pages that are only available through the use of forms and user entries. The sitemap files can then be used to indicate to a web crawler how such pages can be found.

    Google, MSN, Yahoo and Ask now jointly support the Sitemaps protocol.

    Since MSN, Yahoo, Ask, and Google use the same protocol, having a sitemap lets the four biggest search engines have the updated page information. Sitemaps do not guarantee all links will be crawled, and being crawled does not guarantee indexing. However, a sitemap is still the best insurance for getting a search engine to learn about your entire site.

    XML Sitemap Format:
    The Sitemap Protocol format consists of XML tags. The file itself must be UTF-8 encoded. (Sitemaps can also be just a plain text list of URLs. They can also be compressed in .gz format.)

    Sample:
    A sample Sitemap that contains just one URL and uses all optional tags is shown below.

     

    http://Yoursite.com/sitemap.xml
    2008-05-10
    weekly
    0.8

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