Most websites today have a sitemap that lists the content on their site. But there are two types of sitemaps you can have that enable search engines to crawl the content.
A sitemap is a web page on a site that lists in some format the information found on the web site. It is basically a table of contents for your website. Sitemaps are extremely useful if a site is very large as it enables visitors to easily see at the glance the content available. It’s also used by search engines to crawl your content quickly. There are two types of sitemaps that should exist on a website: one you create that is seen by visitors and one that is hidden and used only by search engines. We will discuss both of these sitemaps and how you can create them.
User-Generated Sitemap
You can create and maintain a sitemap for your site in one of two ways depending on how your site is built. If your site is static, you have to code it and maintain it. Every time the content changes you need to update the sitemap to reflect what’s changed. If you have a dynamic sitemap with navigation fed from a database, then you can create a sitemap that automatically shows the changes reflected on your sitemap.
A few important sitemap tips include:
- Keep it short – if it’s more than one page think about how you can reduce it to only one by showing the most relevant content
- Shows levels of navigation – show several levels of hierarchy (3 navigation layers deep)
- Use keywords to define your sitemap link titles – run your keywords against a Keyword Analyzer and look for the best keywords to describe the content the link points to.
Search Engine Sitemap
There was a time when you had to create a different version of a sitemap for each search engine. In November of 2006, Microsoft, Google and Yahoo all agreed on a standard sitemap protocol. It is an xml file that sits on the server your site is hosted on that all three search engines can use to track updates to pages. This xml file describes the following information for each link on a website:
- URL
- Last updated
- Frequency changed
- Importance to the site (relative to other content on the site)
Sitemap Generator
The good news is you don’t have to create this sitemap yourself. There are many free and not so free sitemap generators on the web that will create the sitemap for you and then let you edit the information in it. However, if you want to – you can create it on your own. Here are some of the basic requirements to create a sitemap:
- Name it sitemap.xml
- Maximum of 50,000 URLs per sitemap
- Maximum of 10MB in size
- The sitemap must be UTF-8 encoded
- The location of your sitemap is important (you can also use your robots.txt file to indicate the location of your sitemap)
You can validate your sitemap using tools either by Google, Yahoo or other online resource.
Both Google and Yahoo have resources to help you monitor your website and sitemap. For example, Yahoo Site Explorer enables you to explore all web pages indexed by Yahoo search looking at the most popular pages, find pages that link to your site or a page on your site and dive into a comprehensive sitemap.
Sitemaps are critical to a strong search presence
Make an effort to have both sitemaps available on your website. The visual sitemap will help visitors quickly locate the information they are looking. Both sitemaps help search engines quickly crawl and index your content. While there’s no guarantee that either sitemap will help improve your rank in the search engine, the hidden sitemap does ensure that all your content is indexed and available.
