Downtempo LLC: Our Fantastic Blog

XML sitemaps are key to instructing Google and other search engines the page structure of your site, how often page content is updated, and when new content is added to the site.

Using an XML sitemap will help ensure:
1.) All site pages are crawled and indexed.
2.) Frequently-updated site pages are crawled more often.
3.) New site pages are quickly indexed.

The standard XML sitemap structure is available at http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.php – for an example of a sitemap that i used with my travel blog, see http://www.goneliving.com/sitemap.xml.

I recommend posting the sitemap at the standard filename (sitemap.xml) and location (your website’s root directory), so your website’s sitemap would live at “http://www.yoursitename.com/sitemap.xml”.

The sitemap should contain URLs to every page on the website, which means that it would need to be automatically updated by your website CMS every time a new page is added to the system (or manually updated if you don’t have a CMS).

When you’re ready to submit your sitemap to Google, you can submit it at http://www.google.com/webmasters/. it will also give you valuable feedback about how pages are ranked at Google from the site, and also let you know of any 404s or other problems with the sitemap. (Note that Yahoo! has a similar product with Yahoo! Site Explorer, available at https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com)

To ensure autodiscovery of your sitemap from all search engines (like Ask, MSN Live Search, and so forth), you need to add this line to your website’s robots.txt file:

Sitemap: http://www.yoursitegoeshere.com/sitemap.xml


And you’re done! You’ll see an improvement in how your website is indexed, and get a lot of valuable data from products like Webmaster Tools and Site Exporer.