Sitemaps versus Site Maps

While most websites have “site maps” to help visitors find what they need, such site maps don’t necessarily tell the crawlers, bots and spiders what they need to know. So how do you help out the crawlers? By creating “sitemaps“.

Sitemaps.org was launched recently, which is a joint effort by the major players in the search engine industry to create a standard protocol for creating sitemaps. Sitemaps are typically XML files that reside in the root of your website. You can have as many as you wish, but most website just have one. Here is Google’s Sitemap. There is a great example of the sitemaps xml format on sitemaps.org as well.

So, now that you have a sitemap created, how do you know the crawlers will find it? Well, let me help you there as well. Google and Yahoo! both have free utilities to manage your sitemaps. Google Sitemaps is one of the many free Webmaster Tools they offer. Yahoo! has also come out with a tool recently called Yahoo! Site Explorer. Both allow you to define your sitemaps and will subsequently tell you when the crawlers last visited your site. Google takes that a step further and gives you some nice statistical information regarding the activity of the crawlers, pages not found, etc.

I highly recommend setting up sitemaps for each of your websites. Every web site I’ve submitted a sitemap for has seen a significant increase in traffic.

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