Sitemap

A Sitemap enables you to provide specific information about your site to select search engines on the Internet. It is a customized XML file that search engines filter through to streamline the crawling of your Web site. For example, your Sitemap can tell a search engine which pages of your site are updated more frequently and which are of higher importance. This allows the search engine to crawl the more relevant pages of your Web site, resulting in updated search results.

Sitemaps can be created or generated to help search engines direct users to the most relevant documents and folders. For example, a specific document that is accessed quite frequently can be added to your Sitemap with a higher priority than other documents. If the search engine only has resources to crawl 10 documents out of the 100 in your repository, it will be one of the documents crawled. The result is that the search engine is more up-to-date when searching for this document, making it easier for users to find.

You can create the Sitemap yourself, or find a Sitemap generator on the Web to do the work for you. For example, Google provides a Google Sitemap Generator that can be installed on your Web server to generate the Sitemap automatically. To write a Sitemap manually, visit http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.php for the standard Sitemap protocol.

Once you have the Sitemap file, submit it to the search engines of your choice. To submit your Sitemap, update the ping URLs below with the appropriate location of your Sitemap. This will send your Sitemap to the specified search engine. If you update the Sitemap, use the ping URLs to submit it again. Some search engines have tools you can use instead of the ping URLs.

Ping URLs

Sitemap

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