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XML Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to tell search engines about pages on their site that may be crawled by their robots.

A typical XML Sitemap file lists each URL, together with information about when it was last updated, how often it normally changes, and how important it is, relative to other pages in the site). This helps search engines to more intelligently crawl your site.

In November 2006, Google, Yahoo! and MSN joined forces to support a new industry standard for sitemaps: Sitemaps 0.90. As long as webmasters follow the protocol, they can ensure their sites are fully and consistently indexed across all the major search engines (a real step forward). This article is important for all those with missing or poorly ranked pages.

The official site for the joint venture is at sitemaps.org and contains a lot of info about the new standard and it's syntax. What the site singularly fails to do is explain correctly how to submit your sitemap to the big three! The format suggested on the site of:


search-engine-url/ping?sitemap=your sitemap_url

does not currently work at any of the three sites! Until it does, this short article provides instructions for how to (a) create your sitemap and (b) how to submit to each of the three main search engines...

Creating your Sitemap

Some hosting providers (for example 1and1) provide utilities via their web control panel, to create your sitemap, so you should always check with your provider first. If this service is not available, then make a visit to xml-sitemaps.com and enter your site URL into the generator box. Copy-and-paste the resulting sitemap into notepad, then save-and-upload to your site with the file name: sitemap.xml

If you want to validate the XML prior to uploading to the search engines (useful if you have made any manual amendments), look at the XML validator (at the same site) where you can put in the URL of your sitemap and check it against the standard.

Submit sitemap to MSN

MSN have yet to implement a formal interface for Sitemap submission (as at July 2007). To monitor the situation, please visit (from time to time) the MSN Official Livesearch Blog (where where future announcements are likely to be found).

Whilst MSN have yet to implement a front door, there is a recognised back door for submitting your sitemap to the MSN Search index; namely moreover.com! You should use the following syntax directly in your browser URL box:


http://api.moreover.com/ping?u=http://yourdomain.com/yoursitemap.xml

Since February 2005, moreover.com have been the official provider of RSS feeds to the myMSN portal (see press release) and reliable evidence suggests that submission to Moreover will result in MSN spidering your pages within 2-3 weeks.

Note that, whilst MSN still do not support direct submission, they do suggest on their blog that you add a reference to your Sitemap into your robots.txt file (something now supported by sitemaps.org). For example:


User-agent: *
Sitemap: http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml
Disallow: /cgi-bin/

This would tell MSN (and all other engines) to crawl your sitemap file but not to crawl your cgi-bin directory. For more info on how to implement a robots.txt file (in the root of your site webserver) please visit: http://www.robotstxt.org

Submit sitemap to Google

Google originally developed the XML schema for sitemaps and have developed a dedicated portal for webmasters, from where you can submit your sitemap:


google.com/webmasters/

First, you need to tell Google all the sites you own, then verfiy that you indeed own them. The verifiaction is achieved by adding a metatag between the head tags on your site homepage. The syntax for the tag is as follows:



There are full instructions on how to do this on the Google site.

Submit sitemap to Yahoo

Yahoo follows a similar approach to Google. Again, there is a dedicated sevice for webmasters (Yahoo! Site Explorer) and a procedure for verifying your ownsership of the site. First go to:


siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/

Add a site, then click on the verification button. You can then download a verfication key html file - which you will need to upload to the root directory of your webserver. Then you can return to Site Explorer and tell Yahoo to start authentication. This will take up to 24 hours. At the same time you can also add your sitemap by clicking on the manage button and then adding the sitemap as a feed.

Submit sitemap to Ask

Ask follows a simpler approach to the other three. To submit you sitemap, you simply enter a ping URL, followed by the full URL of where your sitemap is located:


http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http%3A//www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml

After clicking return, you will get a reassuring message from Ask that they have received your submission. Very neat!

Google Sitemaps is a simple and fast way for your site to
be constantly indexed and updated by Google.

This article will discuss the benefits of implementing this
new technology, who should use it, how it works and how to
create a Google Sitemap for your web site.

Benefits of having a Google Site Map

1. Speeds up the discovery and addition of your web pages
in the Google index.


2. Enables Google to quickly find web pages that have been
recently changed.


3. A method for your site to be listed and appear quickly
in Google.


4. Helps Google to keep search content fresh, so people
have the most up to date information available.


Who should use Google Sitemaps?

All site owners can use Google sitemaps whether you have
one page or millions of pages, however it's mostly geared
towards people that make frequent changes to their web
pages.

Normally web pages on a large site will not all get indexed
because the links are too deep within the site. By
including all your pages in the Google Sitemap you have a
better chance of them all being indexed as Google thrives
on fresh content. According to Google, it won't increase
your site's rankings.

How does it work?

Google sitemaps are created using XML (Extensible Markup
Language). This is a coding language similar to HTML(though
a little more complex). It is often used these days in
syndicated feeds or blogs.

Here is the sample XML code you would include for each page
of your site:

<.url><.br>
<.loc>http://www.yoursite.com/<./loc>

<.lastmod>2005-07-15

<.changefreq>monthly<./changefreq>

<.priority>0.5<./priority>

<./url>


(remove periods for code to work)

Here is a breakdown of what each line represents:

location - name of your webpage ie http://www.yoursite.com

last modified - when you last modified the page.

change frequency - tells Google how often you modify that
particular page, whether it's never, weekly, daily, hourly,
monthly or yearly.

priority - sets the priority you want Google to place for
that page on your site. You can prioritize your pages: 0.0
being the least, 1.0 being the highest, 0.5 is in the
middle.

This is only relative to your site. It will not affect your
rankings. Certain pages on your site may have more
significance than others because they are updated more
often ie home page, articles page.

How to Create a Dynamic Google SiteMap XML File

It would take a long time to create your Google Sitemap by
hand especially if you have a site that contains 1000s of
pages.

Fortunately Google provides the Sitemap Generator that
allows you to generate a sitemap very quickly. It's a
Python script that creates a Sitemap for your site using
the Sitemap Protocol. This script can create Sitemaps
from URL lists, web server directories, or from access
logs.

You can read more about it here:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login

Other Sitemap Generators.

Google has also compiled a list of third party generators.

Personally I use the free sitemap generator
It's simple to use and quickly produces the necessary
XML code for your site.

Here are the steps on how to create your Sitemap using this
free Sitemap Generator:

1. Go to http://www.sitemapspal.com and enter your site's
address.

2. Copy the code that it generates for your site and paste
it into notepad.

3. Save the text file as sitemap.xml

4. Upload this file to the root directory (same place as
your home page) of your web server.

5. Open up a Google Site Map account and submit
your site's address.

6. Every time you modify a page or pages, login to your
Google account and click on the resubmit button.

7. Repeat this procedure for all of your web sites.


Conclusion

Google is still the largest and most accessed search engine
on Net. Each year millions of web sites get added to Google
making your site harder to find. Creating a Google Sitemap
will help your web pages stay fresh in Google's index.

Search Engine Optimization. A lot of people are clamoring to know exactly what it is. SEO is the process of enhancing the presence and visibility of a website on search engine listings. Not only is it a process, it is about the tool required to make the enhancement happen. There are two main types of search engine optimization:

*On page Optimization

*Off Page Optimization

When SEO was in its infancy, getting back links to a site was the most important factor. In fact, many books and articles written on the subject will still tell people that getting back links is the only proper way to optimize a website. Back links with proper anchor text, of course.

After search engine optimization has a chance to mature, SEO specialists became aware that using only back links is not at all the best way to optimize a site. In fact, if an SEO is only creating back links, the site is not getting optimized.

In On page site optimization, there are techniques and tools that are related to your own website and in OFF page optimization, there are items which are related to the other websites. In On page the old technique was Meta Tag Optimization, appropriate content, Alt tag optimization, proper navigation for the website and much more activities through which changes were made to the website, itself. In OFF page optimization, only back links were created.

Today, optimization is a little bit different. While using the old techniques are still appropriate, creating a Sitemap can be added to the list. Sitemap is something that came in existence a few years ago.

A Sitemap is a graphical representation of the architecture of a website. There are two kinds of site maps. The first is used to assist visitors to a site to navigate the site and the second is done in XML. XML Sitemaps--usually called Sitemap with a capital 'S'--are used by Goggle to gather information about the site.

Sitemap is especially important if your site:

* Has dynamic content

* Has pages with a lot of flash or AJAX

* Is new and does not have many links

* Has a lot of archived pages that are not linked well, or not at all

The use of Sitemap becomes doubly important if the site has pages that can only be accessed through user entry. Sitemap will assist web crawlers in finding and accessing the pages.

Google has a very nice Sitemap tool that will assist in the creation of Sitemap for a website.