What is a Sitemap XML File?
By Jason Perry
A sitemap.xml file allows you to tell search engines about URLs on your websites that are available for crawling. Sitemap.xml files help search engine bots and does not replace the current crawl-based mechanisms that search engines already use to discover URLs. By submitting a sitemap.xml file, you are basically helping a search engine's crawler to do a better job of crawling and indexing your web site. Google, Yahoo!, Ask.com and Moreover.com all are now 'friendly' with the sitemap.xml file.
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What is a Sitemap XML File?[/caption]A Sitemap File
It should be noted that having a sitemap.xml file has no impact on the page rank of your website. Nor, will using a sitemap.xml file guarantee that your web pages will be included in the search results index. A sitemap.xml file is only a file which tells the search engine bots where to look for content on your web site.
A Sitemap Index File
You can create multiple sitemap.xml files, however each sitemap.xml file that you provide must have no more than 50,000 URLs and must be no larger than 10MB (10,485,760 bytes).
Tags in the Sitemap.xml File
The URLSET Tag
Encapsulates the file and references the current protocol standard.
The URL Tag
Parent tag for each URL entry. The remaining tags are children of this tag.
The Loc Tag (Location)
This is the URL of the web page. It must be fully qualified URL.
The Change Frequency Tag
This setting indicates how frequently the content at a particular URL is likely to change. It can be set to always, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly or never.
The Last Modified Tag
The time the URL was last modified. This information allows crawlers to avoid recrawling documents that haven't changed. This date should be in W3C Date/Time format.
The Priority Tag
The priority of a particular URL relative to other pages on the same site. The value for this tag is a number between 0.0 and 1.0, where 0.0 identifies the lowest priority page(s) on your site and 1.0 identifies the highest priority page(s) on your site. The default priority of a page is 0.5.
The priority assigned to a web page has no influence on the position of your URLs in a search engine's result pages. Nor, does assigning a high priority to all of the URLs on your web site will help you.
These are the basic set-up tips for creating a sitemap.xml index file or a regular sitemap.xml file. For a complete listing of all of the sitemap.xml variables and options, http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.php is a good source of information on the actual creation and working samples of sitemap.xml files.
Jason Perry
A good SEO effort should be planned out, not rushed. Small Steps SEO Don't rush a good thing!
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