SEO Tip, Importance of a Sitemap

There are lots of SEO tips and tricks that help in optimizing a website's relevance score. One often overlooked file that should be included on your website is the Sitemap or Sitemap.xml file.

Why are Sitemaps Important? 

A Site Map (or Sitemap.xml file) is a list of website pages on your website that are accessible to crawlers or users. As the name implies, a Sitemap is just a map of your site. Sitemaps provide a roadmap allowing search engines an easy way to navigate websites. Sitemaps also inform search engines when new changes have occurred, how often they should come back, what the priority is and so on.

What do Sitemaps look like? 

Sitemap xml formats can be found at http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.php

Generating and Submitting the Sitemap 

The steps to adding a Sitemap to a website are relatively simple.

• Generate the Sitemap - To Generate the Sitemap simply go to the following website http://www.xml-sitemaps.com
• Upload the Sitemap to the Website - To Upload the Sitemap you will need a FTP (File Transfer Protocal) program to upload the new Sitemap.xml file. A really good FTP program to use is http://filezilla-project.org/. The program is free and is very easy to use. You will also need to have the FTP User Name and Password for your website. The information will be used when connecting using the FTP program. The Sitemap should be placed in the root directory of the website. Once the Sitemap has been added, the last step is to notify the various search engines that a sitemap has been added to the website.
• Notify Search Engines  - You can use the http://www.sitemapwriter.com/notify.php to help submit your website to Google, Bing, Ask and Yahoo.