Mindfu

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. This helps visitors and search engine bots find pages on the site.

In order for the “crawlers” from Search Engines like Google (or Yahoo, Microsoft, Ask, etc) to find and index your site, you must create a sitemap and register the sitemap with each search engine. This can become complicated since each of the Search Engines have a different interface for submission. You might consider working with an expert in Search Engine optimazation in order to get this done right. The other thing you must remember is that if you make changes to the structure of your site, by adding new pages, changing the names of your pages, or removing pages, you will have to update your sitemap again to make sure the site is indexed correctly and you do not cause any errors for the crawler (spider or bot).

Sitemaps are a useful tool for making sites built in Flash and other non-html languages searchable. Note that because the website’s navigation is built with Flash (Adobe), the initial homepage of a site developed in this way would probably be found by an automated search program (ref: bot) However, the subsequent pages are unlikely to be found without an XML sitemap.

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>

<urlset xmlns=”http://www.example.com/sitemap/0.9“>

<url>

<loc>http://www.example.com</loc>

<lastmod> 2009-09-22</lastmod>

<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>

<priority>0.8</priority>

</url>

<url>

<loc>http://www.example.com/?id=who</loc>

<lastmod> 2009-09-22</lastmod>

<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>

<priority>0.8</priority>

</url>

<url>

<loc>http://www.example.com/?id=what</loc>

<lastmod> 2009-09-22</lastmod>

<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>

<priority>0.5</priority>

</url>

<url>

<loc>http://www.example.com/?id=how</loc>

<lastmod> 2009-09-22</lastmod>

<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>

<priority>0.5</priority>

</url>

</urlset>

Mindfu provides Search Engine Optimation services as well as sitemap creating and registration. If you are interested in this service, contact us at info@mindfu.com and we can have you set up and running in no time.