Web Designs for Small Business » XML http://www.daybreakwebdesigns.com/blog Wed, 07 Jul 2010 20:14:38 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 Using Site Maps as a Search Engine Optimization Tool http://www.daybreakwebdesigns.com/blog/2007/09/05/using-site-maps-as-a-search-engine-optimization-tool/ http://www.daybreakwebdesigns.com/blog/2007/09/05/using-site-maps-as-a-search-engine-optimization-tool/#comments Wed, 05 Sep 2007 17:27:32 +0000 JC http://daybreakwebdesigns.com/blog/2007/09/05/using-site-maps-as-a-search-engine-optimization-tool/ A simple sitemap is an important tool to insure that every page of your site gets indexed.

A sitemap can be a manually coded page that lists all the pages of the site, or can be created via special tools such as www.xml-sitemaps.com

Once sitemaps are created and installed, their locations should be spelled out in a robots.txt file.

Here is information on creation of a robots.txt file which will assist search engine robots in indexing your site:

Each site should include a robots.txt which specifies sitemap locations.

To specify the location of sitemaps, just put a line like this anywhere in your robots.txt file:

Sitemap: http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml
or
Sitemap: http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap.html

Replace the Sitemap: http://www.yoursite.com/ with the actual full URL. For example, if www.yoursite.com has a sitemap file called sitemap.xml in top level, the reference would be like this:

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

If you have more than one sitemaps you can either create a special “sitemaps index” file that links to all of them, then put a link to the sitemaps index file in your robots.txt file.

An simpler process is to simply list more than one sitemaps in the robots.txt file.

Example:

Sitemap: http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml
Sitemap: http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap.html

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