A Sitemap is a graphical representation of the architecture of a website or a Sitemap is a web page that lists all the web pages on a website, typically organized in hierarchical way. Sitemaps is one of the tips to optimize your site for SEO. Sitemap is just a map of your website where you display structure of site within a page. An updated sitemaps is better for your users and engines as well. In robots.txt you tell engines which parts of your site to exclude from indexing, in your site map you tell search engines where you'd like them to go.
Site maps are not just a part of your part of your website that displays only structure but its part of best web design practice. When we talk about search engines, now its more important to have a sitemap with your website. So, from SEO view point sitemaps are very important. There are two kinds of site maps. The first is used to assist visitors to a site to navigate the site and the second is done in XML .Both MSN and Yahoo keep to the standard html format while Google Sitemaps uses a special (XML) format that is different from the ordinary html sitemap for human visitors. XML Sitemaps--usually called Sitemap with a capital 'S'--are used by Goggle to gather information about the site.
Now, there is question that why two sitemaps are important. Answer is very simple, and that is one you have for human visitors and second one you have for spider. In relation with duplicate contents with two sitemaps, in introduction to sitemaps, Major search engine defines in its introduction that using sitemap never lead to penalty for your website.
Sitemap is important if your site:
1)Has dynamic content
2)Has pages with a lot of flash or AJAX
3)Is new and does not have many links
4)Has a lot of archived pages that are not linked well, or not at all
Advantages of Sitemap
There are many advantages of using a site map in Search Engine Optimization
Site map not only makes your navigation easier but its also a better visibility by engines.
Sitemap also enable you to inform engine about the current updates within your website. You cannot expect that search engine will not index your updates but using a sitemap the process will be faster as compared to your don't have a sitemap and spider has to search whole of your contents.
When you have sitemap with your site and you submit it to engines then you not to rely on external links that will bring engine to your website for indexing purpose
Sitemaps also help your with internal links. Like within your site if you have accidentally broken internal links that cannot be reached in other way (better it would be you have to fix your internal errors and then you rely on sitemap for better ranking).
Sitemap is a better way to let engine know the structure of website. It helps the engines find pages that may have not been properly linked throughout the rest of the site.
Steps for Sitemap
1)Generate the sitemap.
2)Upload sitemap to your website
3)Notify the Google about your sitemap.
How to Generate Sitemap
it depends upon your technical capabilities, to generate a sitemap you have two ways. First what you have to do is to download and install it and the second one is to use online sitemap generation tool for your site. The first method (to download and install) is little difficult but you have more control over the output by using first method. Google sitemap generator can be downloaded from here (http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=137793&package_id=153422). When you download the package, you have to follow the configuration instructions and installation procedure. The second method is online sitemap generation tool, for this I recommend http://www.rankingtoday.com/seo/sitemap-generator.php website. This website gets the url of your website and then display the xml sitemap for you, you just simply copy/paste that code and put into notepad and save this file as .xml and then put this file into your root folder and then notify the google.
How to inform Google
Just hitlink(https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin?service=sitemaps&hl=en&continue=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2Fwebmasters%2Ftools%2Fsiteoverview&nui=1). Now if you do not have Google account before, right now you have to open account with Google.
Important Thing:-
Two major Search engines (MSN and Yahoo!) are not supporting sitemaps or at least not in XML format. You can submit a text file with list of URLs for Yahoo. But not even providing that feature, there are rumors about MSN engine that it is indexing sitemaps when you have on your site. Logically I am saying that in future Yahoo and MSN has to enable same feature for indexing your site because it is becoming a powerful SEO tool and you cannot obsolete it.
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