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Build a Sitemap to Put your Site on the Map

What is a Sitemap?

It is extremely important for search engines to have their index up to date. That is why Google, MSN, Yahoo, and Ask jointly support the sitemaps protocol. The simplest form of 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 changes, and how important it is relative to other URLs across the site) so that search engines can crawl the site more intelligently.

Sitemaps are particularly beneficial on Web sites where some areas of the Web site are not available through the browsable interface, or Webmasters use rich Ajax or Flash content search engines do not normally process.

Sitemaps supplement and do not replace the existing crawl-based mechanisms search engines use to discover URLs. And using the Sitemaps protocol does not guarantee the indexing of all Web pages. However, a sitemap provides crawlers with hints that help them do a better job of crawling the site.

Sitemaps Protocol

The Sitemaps Protocol format consists of XML tags or may be just a plain text list of URLs. The file itself must be UTF-8 encoded.

Here is a sample sitemap that contains just one URL and uses all optional tags:

• <?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
  <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>
  <url>
  …
  <url>
  </urlset>

Within each <url> record:

• loc is a required field, representing the URL of the Web page.
• lastmod is an optional field in the W3C Datetime format (e.g., YYYY-MM-DD and HH-MM-SS if necessary), representing the last time the URL was known to change.
• changefreq is an optional field representing how frequently the page is likely to change. Valid values include always, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, never.
• priority is an optional field representing the relative importance of this URL in the Web site.

The full specification of the protocol is available at Sitemaps.org.

Sitemaps, SEO, and Usability

The main benefits of a Sitemap from the SEO point of view are:

• With a sitemap search engines can crawl pages that aren’t otherwise discoverable;
• You can give search engines information about pages’ priority with optional tag in the sitemap. This can help them to order the crawling of the Web site based on priority information;
• You can use two more optional tags: “lastmod” tells search engines when a page last changed, and “changefreq” indicates how often the page is likely to change.

In addition to providing more intelligent navigation for search engines, sitemaps are useful as a secondary navigation aide. Research studies confirm that a sitemap is an important benefit for visitors because it gives them an overview of the site’s areas at a single glance. Besides being dedicated to the visualization of the information architecture, sitemaps act as a guide to a Web site.

You can generate an XML sitemap using Web CEO Editor tool and then submit it to the search engines with the help of Web CEO Submission tool.

SEO Companies’ Visibility Rate

Are SEO companies as good as they claim to be on their sites? Will they return the efficiency they promise? Are their skills qualified? The only way to find it out is to check how they optimize and promote their own sites.

Here we share Top 10 SEO Companies according to their search visibility rate for April 2009.

Web CEO analysts use objective evidence to rate SEO firms according to their search engine visibility. SEO companies’ visibility rate is calculated using a special formula that considers the positions of SEO companies’ sites in search engines results pages for the keywords their potential clients use, popularity of these keywords and number of competitors. Learn more about the formula.

Facts about Sitemap Usage:

• Approximately 35 million Web sites publish Sitemaps. The top ten TLDs for these Web sites are .com, .net, .cn, .org, .jp, .de, .cz, .ru, .uk, .nl. And a long tail of TLDs comprises the last 5% of Web sites.
• Most popular sitemap formats include XML (77%), URL list (3.5%), Atom (1.6%), and RSS (0.11%).
• 17.5% of all sitemaps published are broken down by submission format.
• 58% of URLs include a last modification date, 7% include a change frequency field, and 61% include a priority field.

Sitemaps: Above and Beyond the Crawl of Duty