The Value Of A Sitemap

 

Reveal the heart of your site with a Sitemap. Whereas a robots.txt tells search bots what not to crawl, a Sitemap conversely identifies the most important content on your site for indexing. A well-done Sitemap can help your site be crawled more effectively, and that can only help in optimizing your search ranking for indexed content.

 

However, don't necessarily make your Sitemap a mere URL dump for every page on your site. Include just the important content pages you want targeted for indexing. And then over time, as you update your existing and add new content pages, update your Sitemap as well so that the bots see the references to your latest, freshest content. Unlike with robots.txt files, search bots do not automatically look for and use Sitemap files.

 

To get the most value from your Sitemap development efforts, you need to submit the Sitemap directly to the various search engines. Once received, bots will know to look for the file on your site whenever they visit. Sitemaps do have a standardized structure based in XML tagging. They can accommodate up to 50,000 URL listings. For very large sites that need to identify more content pages, Bing supports the use of Sitemap index files, which enable webmasters to point the index to up to 50,000 standard Sitemap files.

 

Please check the validity of the URLs used in your Sitemap file before the Sitemap is submitted. Search engines typically have a very low tolerance for broken link errors in Sitemaps. Bots will discard Sitemap file data if they encounter too many broken URLs.

 

Types of sitemaps:

1. HTML Sitemap:- A HTML site map is simply an ordered list of URL's on a web page that helps visitors review the wesite pages, and helps promote site usability. A well built HTML sitemap will usually have the most important pages from top to bottom, making it easy to search an entire website from one web page.
2. XML Sitemap:- XML sitemaps are created for search engines to inform them about URLs that are available on a website to be crawled. This is a great way to get deep pages within a site in the SE index.
3. ROR Sitemap:-ROR is a rapidly growing XML format for describing any object on a website (sitemaps, products, services, menus, images, reviews, contact info, business info, etc), so any search engines can better understand its content.
4. Video Sitemap:- A Video sitemap contains links to a videos landing page, along with information that is essential for indexing the video to make it searchable for sites like Google Video. To submit a video sitemap to Google there are certain fields that are required including the video url, the video and video player location, a video thumbnail, and a video title and description.
5. Geo Sitemap:- A Geo Sitemap uses the Sitemap protocol, with additional Geo-specific tags add the attribution tag which appears in the Google search results for your content.
6. News Sitemap:- News sitemaps allow webmasters to have more control over their content that gets submitted to Google News. You can also add additional information about your news, like article title, publication date, and keywords
7. Mobile Sitemap:- Mobile sitemaps allow you to submit a list of URLs with content specifically designed for mobile devices and is used in the search engine’s mobile index.