Sitemaps are a great way to tell the search engines about your pages. In essence they are a big list of pages of your site and by producing one you help to reduce the risk of the search engines not finding those precious pages on your site. In this article I’ll talk about sitemaps, the different types and how to produce one on your website.

What Are Sitemaps?

A sitemap is a list of pages on your website that helps the search engines to index all of your content.

There are two types of sitemaps:

HTML Sitemap

This type of sitemap is merely a page with a list of links to every page on your site.

XML Sitemap

This is a specially formatted list of pages in a specific format with other key information. This is the preferred type of sitemap for search engines.

Why Should I Create One?

Although the search engines are usually good at finding your pages and content. It’s best not to leave anything to chance and give them a clear list of all your pages.

There’s no guarantee that every page will be picked up by the engines if you have a sitemap but having one could mean more pages are indexed; which is beneficial all around.

How Do I Create One?

HTML Sitemap

This is as simple as creating a new page in HTML or through your content management system (although most will likely have a built in sitemap feature or plugin to create a sitemap for you).

Just work in order of importance of pages and create a list of each page with a link to each page.

XML Sitemap

There are several approaches you can take to create a XML sitemap.

1. Use an online XML sitemap generator such as the one at this website http://www.xml-sitemaps.com. The only downside is if your website has more than 500 links they will be missed
2. If you use a Content Management System (CMS) such as WordPress then download a plugin or find the built in feature.
3. Create the sitemap by hand using XML. This website will give you the template to work from.

How Do The Search Engines Find My Sitemap?

You should start by put your sitemap on the root of your website. So that you can access it by this:

http://www.YourDomainName.com/sitemap.html

http://www.YourDomainName.com/sitemap.xml

After you have done that you can also submit the sitemap via the search engines.

Google

For Google you must be signed up for their Webmaster Tools system.

Once you have signed up and added/verified your site, you can submit the sitemap through the sitemaps tab under Site Configuration.

Yahoo

Go to the Yahoo site explorer site and click Submit Site Feed and then enter the address of your feed. For example:

http://www.YourDomainName.com/sitemap.xml

Bing

For Bing you must be signed up for their Webmaster Tools also. Once you have added a site to manage and verified it, go to the Sitemaps tab along the top bar and enter the address of your sitemap to the field under the Direct sitemap submission heading. Hit submit and it will be added.

Closing Thoughts

Sitemaps are another great little way to show the search engines your website. They won’t guarantee that your pages will appear in the results but it will help the engines discover pages that otherwise they may not have.

It’s another one of those tactics that you really should be doing and in most cases it takes very little effort to do so!

If you have any questions about sitemaps or how to implement them, feel free to leave a comment below!

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