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Sitemaps are a common knowledge amongst good website designers. Still, it’s a shame that a lot of websites exist without a sitemap. If you have never seen a sitemap, it can be accessed from a link found at the bottom of a site. As the name suggests it’s basically a map of site’s various pages. It helps visitors locate certain inner pages that are not readily available from navigation menus on the outer pages. Search engines, to increase the usability and accessibility of sites, suggested the practice of sitemaps. Back a decade or so ago sites were only 2-4 pages structures. They were simple structures. As the web grew complex and sites increased in number and size there emerged a need for sitemaps. Even search engines start to rely upon these sitemaps to index various inner pages of a site.
Sitemap Codes
Search engines advocate the inclusion of sitemaps all the time. They are not referring to the ones normally found on the footer bar of sites. They refer to the coded sitemaps. These coded sitemaps are especially designed for search engines and are written in a language that is readily understood by them. This coding language is called XML. So, it not only provides basic stuff, such as, page names and numbers, an XML sitemap includes a lot of other metrics. For example, it’ll include the frequency at which a site is updated, what pages are more frequently updated than others, which page has more valuable info etc. All this helps the search engines catalogue the pages of a site in a better way.
These XML sitemaps are even more important for modern sites, which are dynamic and have a lot of image and Flash content. These sitemaps can’t be understood by a normal human visitor, it’s specifically for search engines. So, with animated and image-heavy sites it becomes even more important that they tell search engines about their content by using XML sitemaps.
Generating Sitemaps
There are two ways you can create XML sitemaps. First is the straightforward coding them by hand. For that you obviously need someone who knows XML and sitemap formatting. Any good designer worth his salt should be able to do this easy and in most cases you don’t even have to ask for a sitemap. They’ll do it anyway.
Still, if you didn’t get one done from your designer for whatever reason you can get it done easily yourself. There are a lot of XML sitemap generators available online, which are free to use as well. You can generate one yourself and upload to te root folder of your site. That’s it; your sitemap will automatically communicate with the search engines and you are on your way to better search engine rankings.
Victor Solovey designs small business websites for local business. He has been a designer for more than 5 years and now works as a freelancer as well. Victor can be contacted to do psd to xhtml conversions quickly. | 