A site map (or sitemap) is a list of pages of a web site
accessible to crawlers or users. It can be either a document in any form used
as a planning tool for Web design, or a Web page that lists the pages on a Web
site, typically organized in hierarchical fashion. There are two popular
versions of a site map. An XML Sitemap is a structured format that a user
doesn't need to see, but it tells the search engine about the pages in your
site, their relative importance to each other, and how often they are updated.
HTML sitemaps are designed for the user to help them find content on the page,
and don't need to include each and every subpage. This helps visitors and
search engine bots find pages on the site.
Since Bing, Yahoo, Ask, and Google use the same protocol,
having a Sitemap lets the four biggest search engines have the updated page
information. Sitemaps do not guarantee all links will be crawled, and being
crawled does not guarantee indexing. However, a Sitemap is still the best
insurance for getting a search engine to learn about your entire site.
Sitemaps are particularly beneficial on websites where:
- some areas of the website are not available through the
browsable interface, or
- webmasters use
rich Ajax, Silverlight, or Flash content that is not normally processed by
The Sitemap Protocol format consists of XML tags. The file itself must be UTF-8 encoded. Sitemaps can also be just a plain text list of URLs. They can also be compressed in .gz format.
A sample Sitemap that contains just one URL and uses all optional tags is shown below.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
For more information on the Sitemaps protocol, please visit http://www.sitemaps.org/index.html or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Sitemaps