The importance of site maps in search engine optimisation
Most website administrators create a site map, but do they actually know why they do this? There are two main reason for creating a site map and both of them entail completely different forms.
Firstly, there is the site map for the customer, that helps them navigate around your website. This usually takes the form of hyperlinks and sometimes even a short excerpt about each page. The link to this site map usually appear somewhere around the website footer.
The second type is the one that we generate to tell search engines about our site. These contain elements that can significantly assist search engines in cataloging your website and therefore your sites performance in search engines rankings.
Site maps should firstly be generated in XML. These can at a later date be changed to an RSS or Atom feed which will tell search engines when URLs are added without having to go back and resubmit your site map all the time, but initially you want Google to know of all your pages and a feed will only give the recent URLs. The alternative options is a straight text file (.txt) but I am not a huge fan of this as it allows only one URL per line and misses all the frequency and priority information.
An example XML site map would look like this:
<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-9″?>
<urlset xmlns=”http://www,sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″>
<url>
<loc>http://xebidy.com/</loc>
<lastmod>2008-04-22</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.9</priority>
</url>
</urlset>
The two most interesting tags are the frequency and priority tags. The frequency tells a search engine how often the content of the pages is likely (not necessarily exactly) to change. The different options are:
- Always
- Hourly
- Daily
- Weekly
- Monthly
- Yearly
- Never
An important point is that although you are only indicating the likely frequency of your page updates you should be as accurate as possible. If you state that your content is updated weekly and search engines consider this information when setting their index stats for your site and it is not the case then the search engines may not return to those pages even monthly, meaning you could go for some time without getting your fresh content indexed.
The priority tag allows you to set a relative value of between 0.0 and 1.0 for each page. Unfortunately it is unlikely that the priority you assign to a page will effect the order in which your pages appear in the search engines (as we know there are many other factors that influence that) however it does tell search engines the order of importance of your pages as you deem them. It will help search engines to determine which pages in your site to index first and it will increase the likelihood of your most important pages appearing in the search databases. Finally an important point is that you will not gain anything by setting all your pages priorities high as the priority is relative to the other pages on your site so your important pages wont be considered over the others.
Once you have created your site map the next step is to advise search engines of its existence. In Google this is easy, you simply submit the site map through the webmasters interface - this is certainly the best way. Alternatively, you can specify the location of the site map into the robots.txt file - this is a good method for when using an RSS for your site map. Ideally you should do both.
For more information on site maps check out sitemaps.org
Tags: search engines, SEO