Sitemaps are something we discuss with regard to the search engine optimisation of your website so I thought I’d continue my SEO speak series by discussing sitemaps in more detail.
Sitemaps can be both XML documents and HTML type pages where the content is visible in a user friendly way.
XML sitemaps are useful to help pages on your website get indexed, although as Pete said earlier this year, they don’t create rankings . When adding large blocks of new content on the site we recommend adding a new sitemap.xml file to the site. Another good way of doing this is to have automatic generation of the sitemap.xml file on your site so that this is not something that you manually have to remember. If you have a WordPress blog you can automatically generate an XML sitemap using one of the free plugins available on the Plugin Directory and there are also tools which can be used for non WordPress sites including Google’s Sitemap Generator. XML sitemaps are great as they allow you to list all of your products in a way that Google can find them, which is esopecually important if you have a shop on your site and are selling 6,000 products.
An XML sitemap should begin with the urlset tag and end with the close tag. This tag should contain a protocol standard such as xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″.
Each URL entry should contain a URL tag and a loc tag as well. XML sitemaps can also include a last modified date using the lastmod tag and a change frequency date using the changefreq tag. Dates for the last modified tag should be in YYYY-MM-DD format. The Change Frequency can be set to the following options:
- Always
- Hourly
- Daily
- Weekly
- Monthly
- Yearly
- Never
Personally if you are going to use yearly or never I’d not bother with this tag.
XML sitemaps are also used when you become a Google News Provider. This type of XML sitemap is in a slightly different format than a normal XML sitemap and is aimed specifically at the Google News Bot. A Google News sitemap should contain the following tags:
- Publication
- Access (if access is limited via a signup or paid subscription, if not this can be left out)
- Genres (this can be things like “pressrelease” or “usergenerated” if these are appropriate, if not this can be left out too )
- Publication Date (required and again should be in YYYY-MM-DD format)
- Title (the title of the news peice)
There are some other guidelines for Google News Sitemaps which can be read at Google’s News Sitemap help page
HTML sitemaps are more for users of the site but also help to provide additional text based links to pages on your site. Hannah provided some useful best practice guidelines for creating HTML sitemaps earlier this year including not having too many links on each page and using keywords and phrases as the link anchor text. Remembering to update your HTML sitemap is important as well as the XML version of the sitemap. However we’d not recommend listing all of your 6,000 products in the HTML version of your HTML sitemap as this then becomes to cumbersome for users to look through and easily find what they are looking for.
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