A Sitemap gives the searchbot a guide of the navigational structure of the website & a clear view of what content has changed since the last time. An XML sitemap helps Googlebot in distributing the Page Rank effectively to the web pages. One can place the XML sitemap in the public directory of the website where it is easily accessible to the searchbots.

Topics Covered:

• Creating XML Sitemap

• Create an XML Sitemap yourself

• Free Sitemap Generator Tools

• Submitting your Sitemaps

• Ping Search Engines

Creating XML Sitemaps

There are various ways to create XML sitemaps:

• Make the XML Sitemap yourself.

• If you own a small website, you can use always use the Free XML Sitemap Generation Tools available online.

• Some hosting providers provide the facility to create a sitemap via their control panel.  One can always ask their hosting provider if they provide sitemap creating facility.

• If you own a large database-driven website, you can ask your programmers to create a script that automatically generates an XML Sitemap.

Steps for Creating XML Sitemaps Yourself:

• Begin the Sitemap with <urlset>tag and end with </urlset> closing tag.

• Include a <url> tag for each URL.

• Include a <loc> child entry for each <url> parent tag.

Example:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>

<urlset xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″ >
<url>
<loc> http://www.kittuk.com </loc>
<priority> 0.9 </priority>
<changefreq> daily </changefreq>
</url>
<url>
<loc> http://www.kittuk.com/about.html </loc>
<priority> 0.8 </priority>
<changefreq> weekly </changefreq>
</url>
</urlset>

Each XML Sitemap contains some standard tags, without which the Sitemap is incomplete & some optional tags. Let’s go through the mandatory tags first.

• <urlset> Tag: The urlset tag references the current standard protocol.

• <url> Tag: The URL tag is the parent tag for each URL of the website. I.e. each web page entry along with the optional tags will be enclosed by its respective URL tag.

• <loc> Tag: contains the URL of the web page. Its value must be less than 2,048 characters.

There are various other tags which are supported by various search engines. Below are the optional tags which are used most frequently:

• <priority> Tag: The priority tag tells Google the importance of that URL as compared to that of other pages of that website. In the above example, the homepage, http://www.kittuk.com has a priority of 0.9, which tells Google that it should give more importance to the homepage than the others.

• <changefreq> Tag: The Change Frequency tag tells Google how frequently the web page is likely to change.  Its values are, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly & never. Some searchbots are likely to ignore the change frequency tag all together, especially when the web page is not as frequently updated as mentioned in the sitemap.

• <lastmod> Tag: The Last Modified tag tells Google the date on which the file was last modified. Its format is, YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss.  You can leave out the hour-minute-seconds and just use the YYYY-MM-DD.

Free Sitemap Generator Tools:

A list of FREE online sitemap generators, downloadable sitemap generator tools for Windows to create sitemaps for Search Engines. List of Free Sitemap Generator Tools.

Submitting Your Sitemap:

Now, that you have made the sitemap, how do you tell the Search Engines about it?  Or rather, if you own a blog, how to tell the Search Engines every time you post a new article. Listed below are the various ways in which you can get your sitemap indexed by the search engines:

• Mention the sitemap.xml file in the robots.txt file: A spider visiting a website first looks for the robots.txt file. One can tell the spider where to find the sitemap.xml file. Enter the following line in the robots.txt file:User-agent: *
  Sitemap: http://www.yourwebsitename.com/sitemap.xml

Here, notice that the name of the sitemap file is ‘sitemap.xml’ and it’s placed in the root of the website. So, wherever you place the sitemap, enter the URL details correctly.

• Google Webmasters Tool: Google provides a way for you to submit your sitemap to it so that Googlebot can find it easily.  For this purpose, create a Google account, go to ‘My Account’, enter the ‘Webmaster Tools’ section, add your website and verify the website. Enter the website & go to ‘Add Sitemap’ option. Here, you can add the Sitemap URL.
  The link to Google Webmasters is http://www.google.com/webmasters.

• Yahoo Site Explorer: Yahoo Site Explorer works on the similar lines as that of Google Webmasters Tool. Sign up, add a site, verify your website & add your sitemap as a feed.  Hereby, Yahoo’s searchbot can have access to your sitemap.xml file.
  Visit Yahoo Site Explorer at http://www.siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com

• Ping Search Engines: Many Search Engines provide a way to the webmasters to let them know about the changes in the website/ blog. One can ping all the Major Search Engines easily. However, be warned not to ping the search engines daily. If you find your website not getting indexed, you can ping the search engines once in a week. If you regularly update your websites content, the searchbots will automatically start coming to your website daily.

Ping Search Engines

• Ping Google:

  http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=http://www.website.com/sitemap.xml

• Ping Yahoo:

  http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/updateNotification?appid=YahooDemo&url=http://www.website.com/sitemap.xml

• Ping Bing:

  http://www.bing.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?siteMap=http://www.website.com/sitemap.xml

• Ping Ask.com:

  http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http://www.website.com/sitemap.xml

• Ping Moreover.com:

  http://api.moreover.com/ping?u=http://www.example.com/feed.xml