Site Maps

What are Site Maps ?
Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.

As said above site map is XML file stored on your side.. So will teach you how to make good format sitemaps. File must be UTF-8 coded using XML tags.

SiteMap File Sample

<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>
<lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.8</priority>
</url>

If you want more details about site map and its protocol.. go here
http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.php

with the help of this you just make XML file. Now upload it to you folder of site.
Now using google account you can submit it to google webmasters tools..
Google webmaster tools
After submitting google will download and crawl it and report you errors. Like many files are not valid or file is not present.

The same way you can submit XML files to other engines like Yahoo, MSN.

Remember if you want to block some links or link from indexing then visit our
Robot.txt post..

You can also create readymade site maps using online tools. I know one of them is
http://www.xml-sitemaps.com

Now if you want to see which page google has indexed then search this way in google
site:www.yoursite.com
By this way you can see chached pages by google.

If you have any questions regarding sitemaps submitting or errors then can post here.
Also check out our old posts for other tips and things regarding SEO.

Thanks

Add to Delicious - Stumble Now