Learn/An-HTML-Sitemap-Helps-Search-Engines-Discover-You

The purpose of a Sitemap is to help search engine 'spiders' find and index all the pages on a website, and faster than they may otherwise.

Indexing is important because if a page on a website hasn't been indexed by a search engine, it cannot show up for any search query in that search engine.

A Sitemap is particularly helpful to websites that:

• have several pages that aren't linked to from other prominent pages
• have lots of pages (more than x)

Types of Sitemaps

The primary type is an XML Sitemap.

The other type is a simple HTML sitemap, that is just like another web page. You have probably seen these on some sites, as a "sitemap" link in the footer.

You can also create a simple text file with one URL per line or an RSS feed (typically for blogs).

Google recommends creating a Sitemap using the Sitemap Protocol because it can be used for other search engines too.

Creating your Sitemap

• Sitemap Generators

Make it work: Let the search engines know about your Sitemap

Submitting your Sitemap to Google via Google Webmaster Tools is probably the most important thing to do. You can also use Google Webmaster Tools to see how many of the pages in your Sitemap are indexed at any given time along with other helpful stats.

To the right is a helpful video from ReadyMadeWeb.com about submitting your Sitemap in Google Webmaster Tools. Also, here is Google's instructions for submitting a Sitemap using Google Webmaster Tools.

You can also submit a Sitemap to Bing using their webmasters tools offering.

If you're familiar with robots.txt you can specify your Sitemap there.

Points of Order

• Sitemaps are purely supplementary. Web pages not in a Sitemap can still be found and indexed other ways, such as through links.
• XML and text file Sitemaps cannot have more than 50,000 URLs per file.
• You can have multiple Sitemaps, and including the same URL in more than one is okay.
• Submitting your site to a search engine is completely unnecessary.

Additional Resources

• {{{2}}} (visit) - Sitemap Protocol
• Google Webmaster Central about Sitemaps in general, creating Sitemaps and submitting them.