A XML Site map can be created as part of your SEO campaign
XML Site maps a great way to communicate with Search Engines
An xml sitemap is your way of listing the web pages within your web site that you wish the search engines to crawl. The advantages of this are you are supplying a list of suggested url's for the search engines to index.
The normal method of web spiders/bots/crawlers to index your site is to find it by following external links from other web sites and then once within your site following the internal links to find all your pages.
“XML SIte map - Google even offer webmasters a submit site map tool and update you on it's successfully submission and details how many of the requested url's have been indexed to date!”
As mentioned in targeted inbound link landing pages some pages of your site may be designed for specific incoming traffic. These pages aren't internally linked within your site and don't always have external links to them so you may find they are not always indexed. By adding the address to your sitemap you are actively telling the search engines it exists and you want it indexed!
Sitemaps help with ranking individual pages within your business website
One of the advantages of a XML Sitemap is that you can set the relative importance of your web site pages. This assumes your average web page has an importance of 0.5 compared to the other web pages within your site.
If you have a page that you rank more important than most of your other pages (the home page is usually a good example of an increased relevance page) then you can tell the search engines your opinion of this by setting it's importance as 1.0 for example.
With a less important page relative to your other pages you can reduce the importance to 0.1 (a legal page is a good example of a page with less importance).
Where and how to save your XML Sitemap
Our recommendation when creating your site maps are to save the files as sitemap.xml and place in the root folder of your directory. Once uploaded your site map should be visible when you type in the below address into your browser address bar www.YourDomainName.co.uk/sitemap.xml
An example of correct sitemap coding
The below code would produce a valid sitemap if all this site contained was a single index file. Additional pages are added by copying the code between <url>...</url> and creating each page locations. On original design our own DeGal SEO sitemap contained 43 individual pages - you can see our own sitemap at www.degalseo.co.uk/sitemap.xml!
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<urlset
xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9
http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd">
<url>
<loc>http://www.degalseo.co.uk/index.html</loc>
<priority>1.0</priority>
<lastmod>2010-08-01</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
</url>
</urlset>
Sitemap Submission In Google
The Google webmaster feature allows you to submit a sitemap directly to Google for submission of your website's pages. This is an ideal way to submit all your web pages to the search engine for indexing. Submitting the site map will not guarantee inclusion within Google - but it is a highly effective way to alert the search engine about your site (we find better and quicker indexing results by doing this as opposed to the add url google feature).
You can log into your Google account and see whether the sitemap has been accepted and also how many of the submitted url's have been added to the Google index so far.
Sign up for a Google Webmaster account now by following this link
