Related Services

• Link Building Services
• SEO Copywriting Services
• SEO Consulting Services
• Local SEO Services
• App Store Optimization
• Google Top 10 Ranking
• Search Engine Submissions
• Ecommerce Website SEO
• Outsource SEO Services

Related Services

• Search engine optimization
• Pay per click management
• SEO Consulting Services
• Local SEO Services
• App Store Optimization
• Web designing Services
• Multimedia Services
• Web development
• Software development services
• Domain registration
• Web hosting services
• Affiliate Management Services

Sitemap

HTML/XML Sitemap

A Sitemap allows creating a file hosted among other files in your account that informs the search engines of all pages your website contains. In other words, we may say that it provides the search engine with detailed information about the content of your website.

Sitemaps are mainly used to improve the index process of a website by search engines. They are also used to provide accessibility to certain pages. For example, pages that are not accessible via the website’s menus can be indexed by the search engines if you want.

The Sitemap does not affect the normal way crawler bots index of a page but it just extends the visibility and accessibility of the website content.

Format

Sitemap Protocol requires definite tags to be present in website’s XML file in order to be properly recognized. The file should be also UTF-8 encoded.

XML tags used in Sitemap file

• There must be an opening tag <urlset> and a closing tag</urlset>.
• Each ‘parent’ entry should begin with <url> tag and end with </url>.
• Similarly ‘child’ entry should be placed between <loc> and </loc> tags.
• After a <loc> tag, a URL should start with ” length of URL permitted is 2048.
• <lastmod> tag accepts a date in the following format YYYY-MM-DD.
• <changefreq> tag is used as a hint for the crawlers to indicate how often the page is modified and how often it should be indexed.
• <priority> value varies from 0.0 to 1.0.

XML schema is used Search engines to define the elements and attributes that can appear in a Sitemap file.

Google schema can be downloaded from the links:

For Sitemaps: Sitemap schema from SiteMap.org

For Sitemap index files: Sitemap Index schema from SiteMap.org

There are many tools available to help in validating the structure of a Sitemap based on this schema. A list of XML-related tools can be found.

• W3.org XML Schema Tools
• XML.com Schema Tools

HTML Sitemap Generator tool can be used to make HTML sitemap web pages for a website. A single webpage which lists all the web pages in a simple manner eases the job of the search engines when crawling the site.

A HTML/XML site map is useful for SEO to make it easier for indexing spiders to find all content of a site. Search engine spiders have a hard time following links that use JavaScript, like mouseovers, so a site map with a collection of plain text linked to all pages can make it easier for more pages of a site to be included in a search engine index. Different search engines use different sitemap formats most common are plain/text, HTML, XML and RSS formats.