Learn SEO – Sitemap Creation

SITEMAPS - Learn about sitemaps

Sitemaps! Is it necessary to a website? What are the sitemaps? How to create the sitemaps? What are the benefits of sitemaps? Is there any correlation of sitemaps between Onpage and off page? What happens if a website doesn’t have a sitemap? For all these questions you are at right place to discover your answers.

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What is a Sitemap?

It is a page or document which includes URL of all the pages in the website. It helps access or crawls all the pages of the website. All URL’s are hierarchically organized in a well-fashioned manner.

How many sitemaps are there?

4 types of Sitemaps

1.    XML Sitemaps

·         Google guidelines for XML Sitemaps

·         A sitemap can contain only 50,000 URL’s

·         Size of file should be less than 50mb

·         If sitemaps contain more than 50000 URL, then break sitemaps into several sitemaps using Sitemap Index File

·         For example –

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

   <sitemapindex xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">

   <sitemap>

      <loc>http://www.example.com/sitemap1.xml.gz</loc>

      <lastmod>2004-10-01T18:23:17+00:00</lastmod>

   </sitemap>

   <sitemap>

      <loc>http://www.example.com/sitemap2.xml.gz</loc>

      <lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod>

   </sitemap>

   </sitemapindex>

·         It is obvious that sitemap automatically crawled or indexed by the Google

·         www or non-www website, sitemap automatically detected by the Google

·         Sitemap must contain - xmlns=http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9 namespace.

How to create a sitemap manually?

Here is the example to create manual sitemap!

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

<urlset xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″>

   <url>

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

      <lastmod>2004-01-01</lastmod>

      <changefreq>Weekly</changefreq>

      <priority>0.9</priority>

   </url>

</urlset>

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2.    ROR Sitemaps

·         ROR stands for the resources of resources

·         ROR information is stored in the feed ror.xml

·         ROR is used to store descriptive information about website

·         Descriptive information includes Price, Pages, product, currency, availability, kind, etc.

Example

<Resource rdf:about=”web-hosting”>

    <type>Product</type>

    <title>Website Development</title>

    <url>http://www.example.com/Webdevelopment.htm</url>   

    <image>http://www.example.com/domains.gif</image>

    <price>89.75</price>

    <priceRecur>67.50</priceRecur>

    <priceRecurPeriod>month</priceRecurPeriod>

    <priceRecurRate>2</priceRecurRate>

    <currency>euro</currency>

    <available>no</available>

    <kind>service</kind>

    <resourceOf rdf:resource=”products”/>

</Resource>

3.    HTML Sitemaps

·         HTML sitemaps make website user-friendly

·         All pages of websites arranged according to topic through HTLMML page

·         HTML sitemaps are generated with the help of third party tools

4.    URLLIST Sitemaps

·         It is comfortable for the Yahoo search engine

·         Saved through urllist.txt

·         It is located in the root directory

What is the format of sitemap?

·         Sitemap.xml

·         Sitemap.html

·         Sitemap.ror

·         urllist.txt

How to find whether a website has a sitemap or not?

After home page URL of the website

type – sitemap.xml, sitemap.ror, sitemap.ror, urllist.txt

Why website need sitemap?

·         Sitemaps make crawlers find all website information in single page.

·         How frequency of web pages change

·         It makes flash and non-html websites searchable easily by the crawlers

·         Sitemaps replace the older mechanism to submit web pages manually through the forum

Final Tree of Sitemap

·         XML Sitemap

§  Index Sitemap

·         URL Sitemap

§  Sitemaps for Webpages

§  Sitemaps for Images

§  Sitemaps for videos

·         HTML Sitemaps

How to generate Sitemaps? Is there any tool to generate Sitemap?

Here is the sitemap generation tool –

https://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

Only 50,000 web pages are discovered by this tool

What about the website sitemap if have more than 50,000 web pages?

Break sitemaps into several sitemaps.

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Do you know about the requirements for the Video sitemaps?

Here is the following information need for generating video sitemaps

·         Required title

·         Well versed description

·         URL of the video play page

·         URL of the thumbnail

·         It is necessary to have the raw video URL

Video sitemap Tags are as Follows-

<loc>

<video:video>

<video:thumbnail_loc>

<video:title>

<video:description>

<video:content_loc>

<video:player_loc>

<video:duration>

<video:expiration_date>

<video:rating>

<video:view_count>

<video:publication_date>

<video:family_friendly>

<video:tag>

<video:category>

<video:restriction>

<video:gallery_loc>

<video:price>

<video:requires_subscription>

<video:uploader>

<video:live>

Conclusion

Sitemaps are the important part of any website, so use tools to create a sitemap, because sitemaps help to make a website easily searchable by the search engine crawlers. It also improves the better ranking of the website. It is one of the most important Onpage optimization part.