How to Create a Sitemap and the Importance of a Sitemap.
What is a sitemap and what's the big deal you might ask. A sitemap is a special file that contains all your links to your sites pages. The most common preferred format is xml. It is used by Google, Yahoo, Ask, Msn, etc.
I realize this article is a little lengthy, but I would read over this when you get a spare moment. Many people do not know what sitemap is, what it does, or how important and helpful it is to getting your site indexed into google, yahoo, msn, and others.
One of the things you can do or include in a sitemap in xml format is priority codes. There is some speculation and debate over the importance of the priority codes used in sitemaps but here are some thoughts by well-known sites that deal specifically with sitemap creation.
Priorities in XML sitemaps - effects on search engines
* Website crawlers and bots:
o Likely Pages with high priority values get crawled more often.
o Likely For new websites, help guide crawlers which pages to index first.
* Search engine result pages (SERPs):
o Likely Help determine which url to show if multiple pages from a website match a query.
* Search engine results and ranking algorithms:
o Speculative If website and XML sitemap is trusted, influence ranking and position in search results.
+ As comparison, it is also possible to boost rankings using SEO linking techniques within a website.
o Unlikely You can use XML sitemaps as a direct search engine optimization (SEO) technique.
Reference: http://www.micro-sys.dk/developer/articles/xml-sitemap-priority-tag.php
Some webmasters will create their own sitmaps based on their own personal opinions and thoughts of how important they think a page on their site is. This is debatable as well. See the above link for more info regarding this.
The one thing you do want is your main page to be the highest priority value. After that your other pages should be assigned a lower value of importance.
DO NOT set all priorities high and DO NOT set all of them the same. Google will error out and not accept your sitemap if all links are the same value. They need to be mixed up and assigned different values.
Valid priority values have range interval [0.0, 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, 0.4, 0.5, 0.6, 0.7, 0.8, 0.9, 1.0].
1.0 being the highest level of importance and should be your top level only.
Here is a shortened sitemap.xml with priorities:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset
xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9
http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd">
<!-- created with Free Online Sitemap Generator www.xml-sitemaps.com -->
<url>
<loc>http://www.dialme.com/</loc>
<priority>1.00</priority>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.dialme.com/blogs</loc>
<priority>0.80</priority>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.dialme.com/links.php</loc>
<priority>0.70</priority>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
</url>
</urlset>
The simple sitemap.xmls (no priorities)
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84">
<url>
<loc>http://www.dialme.com</loc>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.dialme.com/</loc>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.dialme.com/links.php</loc>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
</url>
</urlset>
There are some really good FREE online sitemap creators. Many will create sitemap.xml, sitemap.gz, sitemap.html, urllist.txt, etc.
http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/
The drawbacks of these online creators is most will only scan your site and include the first 500 in a sitemap. For some this is more than adequate, but many will require more than 500.
500 sounds like a pretty big number but remember a lot of your Dolphin site and links are dynamic pages stored in the database. Each and every tag, photo, audio, video, blog, etc...etc. may be considered another link. It really don't take long to have more than 500.
So what do you do?
Use one of the free online sitemap creators so you can familiarize yourself with the format of the xml file. Download it and open it up with a text editor like wordpad or notepad and get a feel for what it should look like.
You can manually add to it any time you want. Just make sure what you are adding is a valid link on your site.
Always check your sitemap after making any changes with a validator tool. If there are any errors in the file google and other search engines will refuse and reject it with errors.
You can verify that your sitemap is valid here:
http://www.validome.org/google/
Most crawlers and bots look at your robots.txt file for instructions on how to crawl your site. Whether certain files or directories are allowed or not allowed to be crawled.
One thing you should do is add the location of your sitemap.xml to robots.txt which can help google, yahoo, msn, etc. find it.
If you already have a robots.txt file (yoursite.com/robots.txt) add the following to specify the location of your sitemap to robots.txt:
Sitemap: http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml
If you do not have a robots.txt you should make one with at least the following statment. You can use notepad or any text editor to make a robots.txt file. Then, upload it to your site root:
User-agent: *
Sitemap: http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml
robots.txt should be named exactly that and in your root directory/folder
sitemap.xml same thing. You should name it sitemap.xml and place it in your root folder
This will help google, yahoo, msn and other search engines index your pages into the directory. There is no guarantee that any of your pages will be included in a search engine. This can substantially increase the process of getting your pages into the search engines if done right.
Most search engine bots will eventually find your sitemap.xml to help speed up the process even more if you don't have accounts with the 3 big names google, yahoo, and msn you should do so. After creating an account with these you can quickly tell them you have a sitemap and this is where it is mysite.com/sitemap.xml. They are FREE to register and create and account: (just do this!)
http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/
http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools
http://webmaster.live.com/
The google account will even tell you how many links are in your sitemap, and over time how many they have included in the google search index. It will also let you know if there are any errors or problems with your sitemap.xml.
You will still need to wait a few days possibly up to a week before you start to see google indexing your pages. Still a one week process for something relatively simple is not bad.
Wow this is really cool...This helps a lot....but there is more...
Another trick or way of increasing your chances of the crawlers/bots from finding your pages is to create a .html sitemap. Most of those same free sitemap creators give you the option of also downloading a sitemap.html. A sitemap.html is a simple list of all your links in standard .html format. You place a link somewhere on a popular page on your site in hopes that the bots will find it and visit all the links on your sitemap.html. For a Dolphin site a good choice would be to put a link to sitemap.html in your Dolphin header or footer. That way the link to sitemap.html will be available on all your pages and thereby increasing your chances of being crawled even more.
So now you have a sitemap.xml and sitemap.html 2x the changes of being indexed for very little work. After-all the online generator did most of it for you.
If you want to see what a simple sitemap.html looks like you can find the link on this site in the footer on the bottom of this or any other page here in the lower right titled "Sitemap".
There are a few minor drawbacks to using those online generators aside from the limit of 500 I mentioned earlier.
1. Once you create a sitemap.xml and sitemap.html and new pages/links are created on your site, you should add these to the sitemap. If you have reached the 500 limit, you will have to manually add the new links/pages. If you have less than 500, simply revisit the FREE online sitemap generator and create a new up-to-date file.
2. If you have a busy site with new content being added, uploaded, etc. it might be too much work to create a new sitemap frequently.
If this happens to be the case I would suggest purchasing one of the pay sitemap creators software. Many of them can be automated or updated by cron at times you prefer.
If you need automation with no cron or complicated setup and configuring. One that will create and update your sitemap each and every time a new page/link is created on your site automatically for FREE. You might check this interesting script out. It is totally automated and extremely easy to set up. Only drawback in the Free version is you can't set priority values. But for the automation it would be worth it for many busy sites. The script says it can easily handle 50,000 pages/links. It is a php sitemap script which stores the links in a database. The extension is sitemap.php which they say google will accept as a valid sitemap. I will continue testing this on another site but so far it looks promising.
FREE Autositemap:
http://www.autositemap.com/
Another fairly cheap auto sitemap script I have not tried but seems very reasonably priced at $10.95 last time I checked was:
http://www.atwebresults.com/scriptstore/cart/index.php?maincat_id=4
In the coming weeks I will be adding and updating:
- This sitemap guide and info
- How to get more visitors and traffic to your site
- How to increase your google rank
- How to get better results for your site in google search, yahoo, msn and others.
- And more!!
All of which you can do yourself. Be gung-ho and get the process rolling fast...or, do it at your leisure in your spare time at your own pace.
This is not something that can be done over night. It does take some time, a certain level of commitment and dedication. You do need to be fairly persistent and keep at it, if you want to improve your site. An inactive site with very little or no content really isn't going to cut it. If you do keep at it over time your site will improve in many ways and many areas. Keep adding content, pages, blogs, whatever. This helps keep google and other crawlers visiting your site often.
Stay tuned for additional information and guides related to this topic in the near future.
