There are various forms of sitemaps, from simple text lists to html sitemaps designed to help users navigate your website, however in this article we'll be taking a quick look at XML sitemaps.
The idea behind sitemaps is to help webmasters work more closely with leading search engines to ensure optimum coverage of their website, whilst at the same time providing additional information to the search engine about the nature of our website.
sitemap.org protocol
There are a number of XML sitemap formats around and some search engines have direct support for various formats, however what we're concerned with is the sitemaps.org protocol.
This protocol has been adopted by the 3 major search engines Google, Yahoo and Bing (as well as other) and so provides you a common platform to work with.
The XML sitemap contains
The webpage url
When the page was last modified
How often you expect it to be updated (daily, weekly, etc)
And the relative priority within your website
The standard is extensible and can be expanded and google accepts additional attributes to allow you to submit media such as images and videos.
Does it help?
You can quite easily see the value of the information you are providing the search with, but the question commonly asked is does it really help?
Well, to be blunt a well designed website probably doesn't need a sitemap as it should be crawled with ease. Whether the supplementary information helps the likes of Google make an informed decision about how it crawls your website, seems to be something of an unknown science.
So what's the point?
Well to be blunt the main benefit does not seem to be around page ranking and search engine optimization.
The real value is in the webmaster tools provided by Google, Yahoo and Bing.
These tools give you insight into how the search engine sees your website, information on your search visibility and your users.
This then empowers you to make informed decisions about how you structure, market and promote your website including keywords, key phrases, structure and content on your site.
Where do I start?
Well first off if you are going to make the most of a sitemap you need to register with the main search engines website and verify ownership of your website. This is a really straight forward process where you either add a meta tag to your webpage or upload a simple file to prove ownership.
Once you've done that you need to create a sitemap.
There are a number of tools around and if you have a smallish website and want something quick and easy you may just want to use a free online tool like the one found at www.xmlsitemapgenerator.org
If you the webmaster of a number of websites and need more advanced features then you may want to mange them from a software package. There are plenty of free ones about!
Our favourite free windows sitemap generators include :
Gsitemap
http://www.vigos.com/products/gsitemap
G-mapper
http://www-g-mapper.co.uk
Conclusion
Sitemaps are simple xml documents that "describe" the structure of your website. Whilst the arguments about the real benefits and purposes seem to vary, we would argue that the webmaster tools give you a real incentive to create a sitemap, especially given that it is free and simple to do.
