XML Sitemaps Get Your Site Indexed More Quickly

There are two types of sitemaps in the Web world. Most of us are very familiar with a Web page that acts as an index to all the pages on our Web site. It basically provides a link to every page on your site in some organized fashion, so people can navigate directly to a page they’re interested in. It also provides the search engines like Google and Yahoo! a place to crawl to every page on your site. However, this article is about an XML sitemap, which is a bit different.

XML = “eXtensible Markup Language”

XML is a standard way of categorizing data in an organized fashion. It’s pretty easy to understand, and an XML file is typically just a text file that you can edit with any text editor like TextPad. Each entry has a starting tag and an ending tag, and data can be layered within subtags. An example of XML data may look something like this:

<urlset xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9 http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd">
 <url>
 <loc>http://www.bayareasearchengineacademy.org/</loc>
 <priority>1.00</priority>
 <changefreq>daily</changefreq>
 </url>
...
</urlset>

Notice that each starting tag (like <url>) has a closing tag (</url>). Fortunately, for this purpose, you don’t really need to worry too much about it, because we’re going to use an automated tool that will simplify everything for us.

XML Sitemaps Are Important

Whenever we’re doing work on the search engines like Google or Yahoo!, and want to get our site listed, we want to get it out there quickly. We can let the search engines “naturally” search all the links coming into our site and those between pages, but it takes time for them to discover new links. Instead, I prefer to jump start the process and just give a road map to the entire site in one file. This way, Google and Yahoo! don’t have to look around for new links, you just tell them where all the pages are.

How Do You Create an XML Sitemap?

Fortunately, there are lots of clever people out there that want to give stuff away for free. A very simple tool that you can use is www.xml-sitemaps.com. You simply enter your site URL and click “Go”. They will crawl all your links and pages within a few minutes, and generate the sitemap for you. You can then just save the file, upload it to your Web site’s root directory, and tell Google and Yahoo! about it (more on that in a second).

I prefer to turn on all the options from the XML sitemap tool above, so you give the search engines more information which can help get you listed:

• Change Frequency: Set it to “Daily” or “Weekly”
• Priority: Set it to “Automatic”

The “Priority” setting will tell the xml-sitemaps tool to try to determine each page’s importance level. This is a scale from 0 to 1. Your Home page is always set to 1. Other important pages will be set to 0.8, and things like your Privacy Policy may be set to 0.3.

Once the tool has generated the file, you should always:

• Make sure it captured all the pages. Open the file with your text or html editor. If any pages are missing, make sure you manually add them in by copy/pasting another page entry. Make sure you copy the entire record, starting with <url> and ending with </url>.
• Tweak the priorities for your site. Google doesn’t like to see all priorities set to 0.8, and their Webmaster tool will flag it. I generally just pick 0.8, 0.5 and 0.3 for the three levels of priorities.
• Save the file, and upload (ftp) it to the root directory of your Web site.

Register Your XML Sitemap with Google and Yahoo!

Once you’ve done all this, you need to tell Google and Yahoo! that the file is there. Create your Google Webmasters account, if you don’t have one already. If you do, go ahead and log in. Click the “Add Site” button, and enter your Web site URL. Once you’ve done that, you can add the XML sitemap link, which should be something like:

http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml

But the file name can be whatever you want, as long as Google can read it (i.e. text format). I just like to keep things standardized and always use the same file name.

Next you need to do the same thing in Yahoo!’s Site Explorer. Create an account for yourself, and follow the exact same steps.

Keep Your XML Sitemap Fresh

Any time you add pages to your site, make sure you go into the file and update the data with new pages or fresh dates. If you’ve optimized a page that wasn’t optimized before, jiggle up the priority. All of this means that you’ll be rewarded by Google and Yahoo! with quicker turnaround times on getting your site pages indexed.