Luke Brown Marketing Blog

Creating sitemaps for your website is one of the easiest things you do to increase your internet presence. By submitting a sitemap to the major search engines, you are showing them your site exists.

There are two types of sitemaps, HTML and XML. An HTML sitemap provides a useful directory of all the pages that are in your site and is designed to be viewed by your website visitors. XML sitemaps are designed and written for the search engines and play a vital role in helping a search engine “crawl” the various pages of your site. For a definitive explanation of sitemaps, visit sitemaps.org

HTML Sitemaps

An HTML sitemap is usually a single page which contains links to all the pages of your website. Normally, this is accessible via a link in the footer section of your website, which should be displayed on every page.

On large sites, visitors can get lost and struggle to find a specific page (another important reason to have a search box on your site as well). Assuming your site architecture is designed well, the HTML sitemap will help guide your site visitors to the page they’re looking for.

WebAssist.com has a pleasing, simple, yet well designed HTML sitemap which can easily serve as a template for many sites. Each page in their website has a footer which contains the link to this sitemap page.

XML Sitemaps

The popular search engines — Google, Yahoo and Bing — use the XML sitemap as one part of their process for indexing the pages of a website. A good XML sitemap will tell the search engine what pages are in your site, how often those pages are updated, and when they were last modified. This way, the search engines know which pages to revisit more regularly and are likely to do a better job of indexing them.

Creating Both Types of Sitemaps

Creating an HTML sitemap is easy: simply create a basic HTML page which contains links to all the pages in your site. When new pages are added to your site, add links to the new pages on the sitemap.

For small sites, creating an XML sitemap manually takes just a few minutes. XML-sitemaps.com and GSiteCrawler.com both offer free, easy-to-use sitemap tools.

For larger sites, creating an XML sitemap can be quite time consuming. Sites with 50,000 pages or more will usually need a custom sitemap built.

Google has a page with a collection of links to tools and code snippets that generate Sitemap files.

How Often Should Sitemaps Be Submitted?

Google recommends initially submitting your sitemap using their Webmaster Tools. This ensures that sitemap details are readily viewable on the first tab of the Sitemaps page in Webmaster Tools. Sitemaps can also be submitted (and resubmitted) by sending a HTTP request to Google and including the sitemap location in your robots.txt file (see details below).

You should resubmit a sitemap to search engines about once every three months. This allows you to update the search engines about any new pages in your site. If you create new pages on a daily basis, you may want to submit your sitemap more frequently.

Updating Sitemaps

To resubmit a sitemap using Google Webmaster Tools

1. On the Webmaster Tools Home page, click the site you want.
2. Under Site configuration, click Sitemaps.
3. Select the Sitemap you want to resubmit, and then click Resubmit.

To resubmit a sitemap by sending Google an HTTP request

If you do this, you don’t need to resubmit it using Webmaster Tools. The Submitted column will continue to show the last time you manually clicked the link, but the Last Downloaded column will be updated to show the last time our system has fetched your Sitemap.

Include Your Sitemap Location in Your robots.txt File

To tell search engines about the location of your sitemap, include the following line in your robots.txt file:

sitemap: http://www.your-domain.com/sitemap.xml

Deleting Sitemaps

You can delete a sitemap from your Google account so that it no longer appears in Webmaster Tools. Google will, however, continue to fetch your sitemap data until you remove the sitemap file from your webserver. If you want to keep the Sitemap on your server for use by other search engines, you can use your robots.txt file to prevent Google from accessing it.

To delete a Sitemap from your Google Webmaster Tools account:

1. On the Webmaster Tools Home page, click the site you want.
2. Under Site configuration, click Sitemaps.
3. Select the Sitemap you want to delete, and then click Delete.

If you delete a website from your account, all associated sitemaps will be deleted as well. If you delete all sitemaps associated with a website, that website will still be listed in your account so you can view information about it.

Final Words

Google does not require sitemaps but mentions they are strongly recommended. Both HTML sitemaps and XML sitemaps are a good step in the right direction to improve your website’s exposure. You will most likely find your search engine rankings climb after submitting a sitemap the first time. This is just one small part of search engine optimization and there is much more you can do to improve how search engines rank the pages on your site and your website’s visibility.

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