Sitemap SEO

What is Sitemap for your site?

A Sitemap is a file that lists all of the available URLs for a site. It also provides web site owners the ability to put additional information about each URL:

The time and date it was last updated how often the content of the web page changes? And how important the web page is in relation to other URLs that belong to the site?

A Sitemap greatly helps search engines to find your website and WebPages faster and easily.
Sitemaps are created using XML (Extensible Markup Language).

Sitemaps Code

Here is the sample Google sitemaps code:

http://www.yoursite.com/

2008-04-15
monthly
0.5

o Location :- name of your WebPages i.e. http://www.yoursite.com
o Last modified: – when you last modified the page.
o Change frequency: – XML tag may be set to one of seven frequencies: “never”, “yearly”, “monthly”, “weekly”, “daily”, “hourly”, or “always”.
o Priority tag in sitemap:

Priority values are relative within your website.
Valid priority values have range interval [0.0, 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, 0.4, 0.5, 0.6, 0.7, 0.8, 0.9, 1.0].
This means that the priority of your most important page should be [1.0].

Sitemaps priority

• The priority of other pages in the XML sitemap should decrease after importance.
• Here are some examples of different types of pages and how their Priority sitemap XML tag value might be set; depending upon how important they are:

o (0.8-1.0): Homepage, sub domains, product info, major features.
o (0.4-0.7): Articles and blog entries, category pages, FAQs.
o (0.0-0.3): Outdated news, info that has become irrelevant.

Change frequency in Sitemap:

o NEVER: Old news stories, press releases, etc.
o YEARLY: Contact, “About Us”, login, registration pages.
o MONTHLY: FAQs, instructions, occasionally updated articles.
o WEEKLY: Product info pages, website directories.
o DAILY: Blog entry index, classifieds, small message board.
o ALWAYS: Stock market data, social bookmarking category.

Note: Each site should have an html sitemap that lists all section titles as
text links. Each sitemap should not exceed 45000 URLs (old items should be in another xml).
Check if the URL is valid (Not truncated, Actual URL). All pages should be there.