First of all, you ought to perceive the whole idea behind the conception – so to answer the question “what is a sitemap”? I’m telling you that it’s more like a table of contents, lining up everything that you have on your website.
It’s not designed for the end user in general – most of them will never see one of them, but it’s critical for the search engines. Some sites’ linking structure are hard to follow from the engine bots’ point of view, so you have to facilitate their access, in order to get your website indexed properly, rank well in the search engines so that you may get traffic.
Now that we’ve covered the purpose, let’s get to the accepted structures. Being a list in general terms – it may be put in respective formats: from XML, HTML,RSS Feed but the simplest way (and my favorite) is a text file.
How to invent a sitemap? Just by putting all of your website’s pages on a long list one beneath another, saving this as a text file and uploading it to your server, you’ve formulated a sitemap. If you have a 10.000 pages website you won’t be capable to do this manually, but there are always helpful scripts out there ready to aid if needed.
Also, if you’re good at it, you could be creating your own script that’s competent to construct it by reading your database(for dynamic sites).
Some web sites offer free sitemap creation services as a trial, others offer internetlocation creation scripts, the offers vary. I strongly suggest you to go for the Google solution which always seems to be the best. They offer a free script to aid you do this. You’ll go through a great deal of trouble installing it, but once you’re done – the map is a worry less for you.
After you’ve developed it, you will have to just upload it on your server (the root directory would be the best choice).
Then you must just include the command “Sitemap: [http://www.YourUrl.com/PathToSiteMap]” (without the quotes) in the robots.txt file on your server and you’re ready to go – the engines know how to interpret a sitemap in a right format.
If it’s well done and your internetsite isn’t well indexed at this moment, you could see a real boost in traffic after creating it.
This is a brief sitemap how to guide, but it ought to support you understand how it works and recognise how to give rise to a sitemap in ordinary terms.
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