Basics of XML Site Map - How to create one & Its Use.

XML Site Map

An XML site map is a document created in XML (extensible markup language) for Google & other search engines. It helps google & other search engine better understand the navigation of your site while crawling, and since its created in XML it is both human readable & machine readable.

Sitemaps are a protocol that allows the webmaster for a website to inform Google and other major search engines about URLa on a website that are available for crawling. Sitemaps allow search engines to find all of your webpages, that they might otherwise miss when indexing. Search engine web crawlers like Googlebot read this file to more intelligently crawl your site. The XML sitemap allows you to specify additional information about each URL such as:

• When it was last updated
• How often the site changes
• How important the page is in relation to other pages on the site
• Having this information within one document helps search engines understand your website and crawl it more intelligently. Sitemaps are an inclusion protocol, where Robots.txt files are exclusionary.

Creating a XML site Map

You can use a sitemap generator to create your sitemap. Google has a sitemap generator for creating a sitemap for a static web site.

Or you can use other sitemap generators and services, such as :

• XML-Sitemaps.com
• SiteMapsPal.com
• SiteMapDoc.com
• Manually Creating a Sitemap

You can also manually create a Sitemap based on the Sitemap protocol.

1. Create a text file and save it with a .xml extension (ie. sitemap.xml)

2. First lines of the file:

3. Create an entry for each URL. The tag is required, the others are optional.

http://www.example.com/

2005-01-01

monthly

0.8

4. Last line of the file:

5. Upload the file to your server and then submit it to the search engines.

Guidelines and Limitations

Keep in mind when creating your Sitemap file:

• Sitemap files have a limit of 50,000 URLs and be no larger than 10MB when uncompressed.
• The Sitemap URL can contain only ASCII characters.
• Sitemaps can be compressed using gzip.
• A Sitemap can be contain a list of Sitemaps (a Sitemap index file serving as an entry point for no more than 50,000 Sitemaps)

Submitting Your Sitemap to Search Engines

There are different ways to submit your Sitemap to search engines:

1. Adding the following line to your robots.txt file

Sitemap:

The should be the complete URL to the Sitemap, such as http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml

2. Submitting directly to a search engine (aka. pinged)

• Google – http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ping?sitemap=location
• Yahoo! – http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/ping?sitemap=location
• Ask.com – http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=location
• Live Search – http://webmaster.live.com/ping.aspx?siteMap=location

Replace location with the complete URL to your Sitemap, such as http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml. For example,

http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ping?sitemap= http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml