What’s a Sitemap?
It’s not to difficult a question, but a Sitemap is a document that can be submitted to search engines like Google and Bing, effectively informing them of every single page on your website.
However these Sitemaps are not automatically added to your website – they have to be created, either dynamically or manually. To see if your email has one the usual ‘form’ is to add /sitemap.xml to your Domain Name and see what happens.
- What is it?
A single file that lists all your pages. - Why and what is XML?
In the past Sitemaps where additional pages on your website – but that led to a lot of variation. So Google decided that Sitemaps should conform to a given standard allowing search engines understand them better. XML is a raw database language of it’s own, consider it like a Spreadsheet with rows and columns, but all laid out more simply. - What information does it have?
Apart from the name of the page ‘/product.html’ the main information held is as follows:Location: <loc>http://www.domainname.com/folder/filename</loc>
Update frequency: <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
Priority: <priority>0.51</priority>These effectively tell Google the type of information each page contains how often it might be updated and how important it is to the website.
- What do with do with this information?
Google and other search engines will automatically try to find a Sitemap and if the format is acceptable they will use the information as part of their ranking algorithm for your website. But we can go further using Google’s Webmaster Tools – we can submit the Sitemap to Google for indexing at our request. It’s a proactive way to tell Google what pages we have.
The advantages to using a Sitemap are immediately obvious, whenever we update our website we can submit it to Google and immediately Google will learn of our new pages. It vastly speeds up the URL submission process.
I’m sure I have a few things wrong here, so if you know more about Sitemaps than me – please feel free to comment.