Using Site Maps as a Search Engine Optimization Tool

posted in: SEO, Sitemaps, XML | 0

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